Sparkles

The glittering flashes of sparkles. One of the world's most popular emojis, it is generally depicted as a cluster of three, yellow four-point stars, with one large sparkle and two small ones to its left or right.

Commonly used to indicate various positive sentiments, including love, happiness, beauty, gratitude, and excitement, as well as newness or cleanliness.

May also be used as a form of ✨emphasis✨ or to convey sarcastic or mocking tones.

As of late 2023, an icon similar to the sparkles emoji is also often used within tech platforms to represent a feature that utilizes artificial intelligence.

Both Microsoft and Twitter’s sparkles were previously multicolored, while Samsung’s sparkles were previously depicted on a night sky, suggesting firework sparklers

Twitter's mobile app uses ✨ Sparkles as a button users can tap to toggle between latest and top tweets on their timeline.

Similar emojis with less implied meaning include ⭐ Star, 🌟 Glowing Star, and 💫 Dizzy.

This emoji predates emojis inclusion within Unicode. The earliest incarnation of this emoji could be found in Japanese emoji keyboards in 1999, specifically within the Docomo emoji set designed by Shigetaka Kurita.
 
Sparkles was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.