Why heart shaped

Show Caption. Hide Caption. How birth control helped shape the iconic heart symbol. Have you ever wondered why the heart emoji looks nothing like an actual human heart? The reasons have everything to do from renaissance lizard dissection to 80's pop music. Perhaps the most unusual theory concerns silphium, a species of giant fennel that once grew on the North African coastline near the Greek colony of Cyrene. The ancient Greeks and Romans used silphium as both a food flavoring and a medicine—it supposedly worked wonders as a cough syrup—but it was most famous as an early form of birth control.

Ancient writers and poets hailed the plant for its contraceptive powers, and it became so popular that it was cultivated into extinction by the first century A. The ancient city of Cyrene, which grew rich from the silphium trade, even put the heart shape on its money. While the silphium theory is compelling, the true origins of the heart shape may be more straightforward.

Scholars such as Pierre Vinken and Martin Kemp have argued that the symbol has its roots in the writings of Galen and the philosopher Aristotle , who described the human heart as having three chambers with a small dent in the middle. It may even have come from a poor attempt at drawing an actual heart.

A lousy artist, an inaccurate description of the subject, or a malformed model all could have led to that shape. The Catholic church explains the symbol as coming from a vision that Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque had, where the "Sacred Heart of Jesus"—associated with love and devotion by Catholics —appeared in this shape surrounded by thorns.

But Alacoque didn't have this vision until the late s, well after the symbol was already documented. This makes it the unlikeliest of origin stories, but the church's frequent use of the shape was probably a driving factor in popularizing it as a symbol of love. BY Matt Soniak.