Best Friend List Planets — Meanings & Colour Cues
Each planet in the Friend Solar System has a distinct colour, ring style and set of surrounding decorations (hearts, stars or nothing) that help you identify which position a friend holds at a glance. Below is the full reference table:
| Planet | Friend Position | Ring / Colour Cues |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury | #1 — closest best friend | Red/pink orb, no ring; four red hearts orbit around it |
| Venus | #2 | Light beige/tan orb, no ring; yellow, pink and blue hearts nearby |
| Earth | #3 | Blue-green orb, no ring; a moon, stars and red hearts orbit it |
| Mars | #4 | Red orb, no ring; purple and blue hearts surround it |
| Jupiter | #5 | Orange orb with dark stripes, no ring; pink, blue and yellow stars |
| Saturn | #6 | Orange/gold orb with a visible ring; pink, blue and yellow stars |
| Uranus | #7 | Teal/ice-blue orb, no ring; no surrounding hearts or stars |
| Neptune | #8 — furthest in top 8 | Deep blue orb, no ring; no surrounding hearts or stars |
Mercury sits closest to the sun because it represents your most active friendship — the person you have exchanged the most snaps and chats with recently. Neptune, at position eight, is still inside your top friend circle, but the least active relative to the seven ahead of it.
What Snapchat Planets Are — the Friend Solar System Explained
Snapchat has quietly ranked your closest friends since the app's earliest years through its Best Friends list — the people you snap and chat with most, ordered by recency and frequency of two-way activity. For most of that time the list only appeared as small emoji next to a contact's name. The "Friend Solar System" changed how that same list is presented: inside Snapchat+, your top eight Best Friends are drawn as planets orbiting a sun, with the closest planet representing your most-active friendship and the outermost planet representing your eighth.
Nothing about the underlying ranking changed — Snapchat is not measuring anything new. What changed is the presentation: instead of a plain list, the app (and countless TikTok explainer videos) reframed positions one to eight as Mercury through Neptune, each with its own colour and, in most community references, a matching emoji. That is why you will see slightly different colour descriptions from one source to the next — the planet skins are a visual convention layered on top of Snapchat's real data, not a fixed spec Snapchat publishes.
What Each Planet Means
Every planet corresponds to a rank, and the rank corresponds to real behaviour rather than sentiment. A few things worth knowing before you read too much into where a friend lands:
- Mercury and Venus (positions 1–2). These are your most frequent, most recent contacts — often a partner, best friend, or sibling you snap daily.
- Earth to Jupiter (positions 3–5). A solid, regular friendship, but with more gaps than the top two — think a close friend you chat with a few times a week rather than every day.
- Saturn to Neptune (positions 6–8). Still inside your top eight, but the activity has slowed, or the friendship is newer and still building frequency.
Because the ranking is activity-based, it says more about texting habits over the last few weeks than about how much you value a friendship. A best friend you mostly see in person rather than snap will rank lower than a distant contact you message constantly — the planets measure the app, not the relationship. If you are still getting to grips with how Snapchat's social graph works more broadly, our guide on what followers mean on Snapchat explains the difference between the mutual-friends layer (which planets rank) and the one-way follower relationship used on public profiles.
Do You Need Snapchat+ to See Planets?
Yes, for the visual. The Friend Solar System graphic — the actual orbiting planets, colours, and position numbers on a profile — is a Snapchat+ subscriber feature. Without a Snapchat+ subscription, your Best Friends list still exists and still updates in the background, but you will not see it rendered as planets anywhere in the app.
If you are not subscribed, the closest free equivalent is the small emoji Snapchat has always shown next to a contact's name in your friends list — a gold heart for a top Best Friend, for example. Those emoji reflect the same underlying data the planets visualise, just without the graphic. Because there is no public Snapchat+ badge, seeing planets on a friend's profile is itself one of the clearest tells that a subscription is active — see our full guide on how to tell if someone has Snapchat+ for the other signals worth checking.
Can Your Friends See Their Own Planet?
Visibility on the Friend Solar System runs one way. A friend can potentially see their own position on your list — for example, discovering they are your Mercury — but they cannot see your entire ranked list of everyone else. Likewise, you can see your own position on a friend's solar system if they have the feature enabled and visible, but not the full order of who else orbits them.
This one-way design is intentional. Showing a complete, named ranking of every friend's position would turn a passive activity signal into a public popularity ladder, which is exactly the kind of comparison Snapchat has avoided building into the product.
How Planet Order Is Calculated and How Often It Updates
Snapchat does not publish the exact weighting of its Best Friends algorithm, but based on consistent, long-standing behaviour it factors in a rolling window of recent activity — snaps sent and received, chats exchanged, and how two-way that activity is. A one-sided stream of snaps you send but the other person never opens contributes far less than an active back-and-forth.
The list is not static. It recalculates continuously as your messaging habits shift, which means planets can move, swap positions, or drop off the list entirely within days if your snapping patterns change. There is no fixed refresh schedule you can rely on — it simply reflects your most recent activity whenever you check.
That same activity weighting is also what decides which notifications Snapchat marks urgent on your lock screen — see our guide on what "time sensitive" means on Snapchat for how the app flags snaps from your most active friends for immediate delivery.
Why Your Planet Changed or Disappeared
The most common reasons a planet shifts or vanishes are all activity-driven, not technical faults:
- Someone else moved up. If you started snapping a new friend or partner more frequently, they can push existing positions down and eventually off the top eight.
- Your own activity dropped. Fewer snaps or chats sent and opened lowers your standing on a friend's list, and theirs on yours.
- The interaction became one-sided. Sending snaps that go unopened, or chats that go unanswered, weighs less than genuine back-and-forth activity.
- A Snapchat+ subscription lapsed. If the graphic disappears entirely rather than a single planet, check whether Snapchat+ is still active — the underlying list persists, but the visual will not display without a current subscription.
None of this means Snapchat is broken or hiding something from you — the Friend Solar System is simply a live mirror of how you and your friends are actually using the app week to week. The same activity-first logic shows up across other platforms too. If you are curious how a similar signal works elsewhere, our guide to who can see your Instagram profile activity covers the equivalent visibility rules on Instagram.
For creators and brands who care about consistent, visible engagement rather than a private friends ranking, the same "more frequent, more two-way activity wins" logic applies on public growth metrics too — a stronger Instagram following or a larger TikTok audience gives your posts more of the early engagement that keeps them moving through each platform's own ranking systems, in the same way frequent snapping keeps you near the top of someone's Friend Solar System.