Flower symbols in text and emoji

Unicode names ✿ the black florette and ❀ the white florette. Here “black” means a solid shape and “white” an outline, not a colour: both take on your text colour, so they turn white in dark mode. They come from the Dingbats block, a set of printers’ ornaments that has been part of Unicode since 1993, and they display on practically every phone. There are only four florettes in Unicode, ✾ ✿ ❀ ❁, and all four are in the grid.

Several other shapes in the grid are officially asterisks: ✽ ❃ ❋ have teardrop-shaped spokes and ✤ ✣ balloon-shaped ones, but they read as flowers all the same. ⚘ is the only character Unicode names simply “flower”. It arrived in 2005 and has no emoji form, so it always stays text.

⚜ is a fleur-de-lis, the stylised lily of heraldry. It arrived alongside ⚘ in 2005 and was later given an emoji form, so the grid has a text copy and an emoji copy.

None of these meanings is fixed, and the words around an emoji count for more than the emoji. A 🥀 under a breakup post and a 🥀 on a dried-flower shop’s profile say very different things.

• 🪷 lotus (2021) and 🪻 hyacinth (2022) are the newest flowers here, so they are the first to show as boxes on phones that have missed a few years of updates. 🌸 🌹 🌷 and 🌻 date from 2010.
• 🏵 rosette, ☘ shamrock and ⚜ fleur-de-lis are text characters by default. Without the invisible emoji selector an app may draw a flat outline instead of the coloured picture, so the emoji copies in the grid carry the selector.
• 💮 is not a cherry blossom. Use 🌸 for spring; Japanese readers may take 💮 as a teacher’s “well done”.
• In flower faces such as ✿◕ ‿ ◕✿, the eyes are geometric circles and the flowers are printers’ ornaments, often drawn from different fonts, so the spacing shifts from one phone to the next.
• Screen readers say each symbol out loud, so a border like ✿ ❀ ✿ ❀ ✿ becomes five names in a row. Two or three florettes as separators are kinder than a full border.

• Pick the flower that matches what you do: 🌻 for a farm shop, 🪷 for a yoga studio, 💐 for a florist, ✿ for anything handmade.
• Use a florette as a bullet between short facts, as in “bakes ✿ classes ✿ custom cakes”.
• Swap the flower with the seasons, 🌸 in spring, 🌻 in summer, 🍂 in autumn, and the bio feels fresh without a rewrite.
• Text florettes follow your text colour, so they stay readable in light and dark mode. Emoji keep their own colours, which helps when a flower should match your brand.
• Usernames can’t hold any of these, but the name field and the bio can.