Hand symbols and what each gesture means

☚ ☛ ☜ ☞ and ☟ descend from the manicule, a little pointing hand that readers drew in the margins of manuscripts and early printed books to flag a passage worth finding again. Printers later cast it as type and called it an index or a fist, which is why Unicode’s names for these characters end in “pointing index”. They have been in Unicode since the early 1990s, have no emoji form and always take your text’s colour.

The filled hands (☚ ☛) are named black and the outlined ones (☜ ☞ ☟) white. Only the upward hand, ☝, has an emoji twin, ☝️, so it may be a line drawing in one app and a coloured hand in another. ✌ and ✍ come from Unicode’s Dingbats block of printers’ ornaments and also have emoji forms. ✊ and ✋ live in the same block but were only added in 2010, as emoji, to fill gaps in it.

Since 2015 (Unicode 8.0), most hand emoji can take one of five skin tones, based on the Fitzpatrick scale that dermatologists use. The tone is a separate character placed right after the hand, so 👍🏽 is 👍 followed by a medium skin tone modifier. A phone that doesn’t support the pair shows the yellow hand next to a coloured square. The yellow default is meant to be neutral rather than a skin tone of its own.

Two-handed emoji took longer. 🤝 only gained mixed skin tones in 2021, built from 🫱 rightwards hand and 🫲 leftwards hand joined by an invisible character. On older software the pair comes apart into two separate hands, which still gets the idea across.

Tip: Press and hold a hand on the emoji keyboard to pick its tone. The printers’ hands ☚ ☛ ☜ ☞ ☟ can’t take one: they are drawn in your text colour.

A hand that is newer than a phone’s software shows as an empty box, so the latest additions are the risky ones in a bio meant for everyone.

• Point at something that is there. 👇 works when the thing below is in the post itself, such as a list in the caption or a question for the comments.
• Go easy on clapping. “Read 👏 the 👏 label” comes out of a screen reader as each word followed by “clapping hands”, which turns a joke into a chore.
• Use one hand per line. ☞ in front of a call to action is clear; 👉👉👉 is shouting.
• Choose text hands for quiet layouts. ☞ and ✍︎ sit well in a menu, a price list or a writer’s bio, where coloured emoji would look loud.