Flower symbols

The flowers that turn up in aesthetic bios are almost never emoji. ✿ ❀ ❁ ❃ ✾ ✽ ✼ ✻ are ornaments from the Dingbats block, and Unicode's names for them are wonderfully literal: one is a black florette, another a white florette, another an eight petalled outlined black florette. In that vocabulary black means solid and white means hollow, so the names describe the ink rather than any colour you will ever see on screen.

Their real ancestry is the fleuron, the flower-shaped ornament that printers have used since the fifteenth century to break a page, fill the short last line of a chapter or mark a pause where a heading would be too loud. That heritage is why these characters look composed rather than cheerful, and why they still work as dividers centuries later. They were designed for exactly the job people now use them for in an Instagram bio.

A couple of the entries come from further afield. ⚘ sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and was encoded as a botanical and genealogical mark rather than a decoration. ☘ is the shamrock, from the same neighbourhood. ꕤ is not a flower in any official sense at all: it is a syllable from the Vai script of Liberia, adopted by users purely because it is small, symmetrical and looks like a blossom, in the same spirit as borrowing a letter from another alphabet because its shape suits you.

The emoji flowers carry meanings that vary by region more than people expect. 💮 is a white flower stamp of the kind Japanese teachers press onto good schoolwork, closer to a gold star than to a bouquet. 🏵️ is a rosette, an award ribbon rather than a plant. 🎋 is a tanabata tree hung with wish papers for a specific July festival. Using them purely as decoration is fine, but they are not interchangeable with 🌸 or 🌷.

For layout work the flat ornaments are the more flexible half of this page. Because they are drawn as text they take the colour of whatever they sit in, so a divider made of ✿ turns white in dark mode without you doing anything, and it stays the same shape on every device. Emoji blossoms are redrawn by each vendor, so a header that looks balanced on an iPhone can look crowded on a Samsung and different again on Windows.

Common questions

What is the difference between ✿ and 🌸?

The first is a text ornament from Dingbats, drawn like a letter in your text colour and identical everywhere. The second is an emoji, drawn as a picture in fixed colours that each platform designs itself. Use the ornament when you want it to sit quietly beside words, and the emoji when you want it to stand out.

How do I make a flower divider for my bio?

Alternate an ornament with a spacer, for example a florette, a space, a small dash, a space, then repeat. Keep the whole line under about twenty characters or it will wrap awkwardly on narrow phone screens. Sticking to one flower shape rather than three reads as deliberate instead of cluttered.

Can I use these as bullet points in a list?

Yes, and it is what several of them were originally cut for. In platforms that strip real list formatting, such as LinkedIn posts or plain-text emails, starting each line with ❀ and a space produces a readable list. Add the space, otherwise the ornament crowds the first word.

Why does ꕤ show as an empty box for some people?

Because it belongs to the Vai script, which older system fonts often do not cover, and a missing glyph is drawn as an empty rectangle. Modern Android and iOS include it through their default font families, but a Windows machine that has never installed a wide font pack may not have it.

See also

• Heart symbols
• Cute symbols
• Star symbols and sparkles
• Punctuation and divider symbols