Sparkle symbols, from ✨ to ⋆

✨ joined Unicode in 2010 with the first big batch of emoji. It sits in the Dingbats block, next to black-and-white printers’ ornaments that have been in the standard since 1993, but unlike most of the ornaments around it, it appears as a coloured picture by default. That makes it bright and instantly readable. It also means it ignores your text colour and looks a little different on every brand of phone.

✦ and ✧ are two of those neighbours. Unicode calls them the black and white four pointed stars; in its naming, black is solid and white is hollow. They are plain text, so they match the size and colour of your words and stay neat in both light and dark mode.

Glitter lines such as ⋆｡˚ contain no sparkle symbols at all. They borrow small marks from maths, phonetics and Japanese punctuation, purely for their shapes.

Tip: Screen readers read these marks by name, so a decorative ⋆｡˚ can come out as something like “star operator, half-width ideographic full stop, ring above”. Keep glitter at the edges of a caption, away from the words people need.

❇ (sparkle), ✳ (eight-spoked asterisk) and ✴ (eight-pointed star) have been in Unicode since 1993 and were later given emoji forms, so each has two looks. An invisible character after the symbol picks one: U+FE0E asks for text, U+FE0F for emoji. Most apps follow the request, though not all, and with no selector the app chooses. As emoji, many phones draw them on small coloured squares that look more like road signs than glitter.

The grid includes both versions of each. For sparkles that never change, use ✦ ✧ ✻ ✼ or ❈ instead: none of them has an emoji form.

• Wrapping a word in ✨, as in ✨self-care✨, adds emphasis, and online it is often read as playful or ironic. Save it for lines where a wink fits, not for a serious announcement.
• One glitter line per caption is plenty: at the top as a header or at the bottom as a sign-off.
• Match the weight to your feed. Fine marks such as ⋆ ˚ ₊ suit a soft, minimal grid; heavy bursts like ✺ and ❈, or the ✨ emoji, suit a bright, busy one.
• Filled and empty four-point stars make a rating or progress line that stays the colour of your text: ✦✦✦✧✧.
• ※ marks small print in Japanese, and it works the same way under a price list or a delivery note.