Unqualified

Technical/Unicode

An emoji sequence missing required variation selectors, which may not render as an emoji on all platforms.

An unqualified emoji is missing a *required* VS-16 character. Without it, the character may render as a plain text symbol rather than a colorful emoji glyph on some platforms.

Characters like ♥ (U+2764), ☺ (U+263A), and ✈ (U+2708) are common examples — they originated as text symbols and need VS-16 to reliably trigger emoji presentation. Without it, rendering depends on platform defaults.

When building applications that work with emoji, always normalize to fully qualified forms for storage and comparison.

Related Terms

Fully Qualified (FQE) Fully Qualified (FQE)
An emoji sequence that includes all required variation selectors and presents consistently across all platforms. Minimally Qualified Minimally Qualified
An emoji sequence missing optional variation selectors but still containing enough information to render as an emoji on most platforms. Variation Selector (VS) Variation Selector (VS)
Unicode characters (VS-15 U+FE0E and VS-16 U+FE0F) that modify whether a character renders in text (monochrome) or emoji (colorful) presentation.

Related Tools

🔍 Sequence Analyzer Sequence Analyzer
Decode ZWJ sequences, skin tone modifiers, keycap sequences, and flag pairs into individual components. 🔢 Unicode Lookup Unicode Lookup
Enter a codepoint like U+1F600 and get the emoji, encoding details, UTF-8/16 bytes, and HTML entities.

Related Stories

Text vs Emoji Presentation Selectors: VS15 (U+FE0E) and VS16 (U+FE0F)
How Unicode variation selectors VS15 and VS16 control text vs emoji presentation — with code examples for detection and normalization.