Phone symbols for calls, contacts and captions

☎ (black telephone, U+260E) and ☏ (white telephone, U+260F) are old desk phones, one filled in and one drawn in outline. Both have been in Unicode since the early 1990s and follow the colour and size of your text. ☎ also has an emoji form, ☎️, so some apps swap it for a coloured picture. ☏ has none and always stays text, which makes it the steadier choice for a line that must look the same on every phone.

📞 telephone receiver, 📱 mobile phone and most of their neighbours exist only as emoji. They arrived in 2010 with Unicode 6.0, the first large emoji release, which was built on the emoji Japanese mobile networks already used. That history explains such oddly specific members as 📳 vibration mode and 📴 mobile phone off.

A ☎ in your bio is decoration. Instagram treats a number typed into the bio as plain text rather than a link, so followers would have to copy it by hand. Business and creator accounts can instead add a phone number under Edit profile, in the contact options. It then appears as a Call button on the profile, or behind a general Contact button if you have added an email or an address as well, as long as contact details are set to display.

• Write the number in international format, with + and the country code (+91 for India, +44 for the UK), so it works for followers in other countries.
• Keep the digits plain. Styled digits such as 𝟗 and 𝟴 are different characters from 9 and 8, so a copied number may not paste into a dialler correctly.
• On a Facebook Page, the number belongs in the Page’s contact details, which is where visitors look for it.

• Emoji switching. ☎ and ✉ can show as text in one app and as coloured emoji in another. The ☎︎ and ✉︎ in the grid end in U+FE0E, a hidden code asking for the text look, which most apps respect and a few ignore.
• New emoji. 🛜 wireless arrived in 2022 (Unicode 15.0) and 🪫 low battery in 2021 (Unicode 14.0), so older phones may show boxes. 📶 and 🔋 date from 2010 and are safe.
• Look-alikes. ⌕ is officially a telephone recorder, but it looks like a magnifying glass, so most readers will take it for search rather than a phone.
• Power marks. ⏻ ⏼ ⏽ and ⏾ are the standard power-button symbols from electrical equipment, added to Unicode in 2016 (version 9.0). ⏾ is the sleep symbol, which is why it looks like a moon.
• Missing pictures. Unicode also has a clamshell mobile, touch-tone phones and receivers held in a left or right hand, taken from the old Wingdings and Webdings fonts, but support for them on phones is patchy, so they are not in the grid.

Tip: Screen readers announce symbols by name: ☎ may be read as “black telephone” and ✆ as “telephone location sign”. One symbol followed by the word Call or Text is clearer than a row of icons.