What is the 🎀 emoji called?
🎀 is officially called Ribbon. It was added to Unicode in 2010, and most phones draw it as a pink ribbon tied in a bow, which is why everyone calls it the bow emoji. It’s the signature symbol of the coquette look: soft pinks, lace and bows in bios, captions and Pinterest boards.
It has a few relatives that are easy to mix up. 🎗️ is the reminder ribbon used for awareness campaigns, 🎁 is a wrapped present tied with a ribbon, and 💝 is a heart with a ribbon around it. If you want the plain bow, it’s 🎀.
Is there a pink, black or white bow?
The only colored bow is 🎀, and most phones draw it pink. There is no black, white or red bow emoji. Text bows like ୨୧ and ౨ৎ have no color of their own: they take the color of the text, so they look black on a light screen and white in dark mode. They’re the closest thing to a black or white bow.
Want a bow that matches a color scheme? Pair a text bow with a colored heart: ୨🩷୧ for pink,
୨🖤୧ for black, ୨🤍୧ for white. The bows stay neutral and the heart sets the color.
How does the bow-on-emoji trick work?
The trick uses ྀ and ི, two vowel signs from the Tibetan script. Vowel signs are combining characters: they stack on top of whatever comes right before them. Put them after an emoji such as 🐶 and many phones draw two curls above it that look like a bow.
- Type or paste the emoji you want to decorate.
- Paste
ྀིstraight after it, with no space in between. - Send it. The bow attaches to that one emoji.
Or skip the steps and use “Put a bow on it” above: paste a whole row of emoji and each one gets its bow. The trick spread through phone tutorials on TikTok, and phones are where it’s meant to work. It depends on how each device draws combining marks, though: when we tested it in Chrome on a Windows PC, the curls sat beside each emoji on a dotted circle ◌ instead of on top. A screen reader may also read them out as Tibetan vowel signs, so keep the trick for decoration.
Which text bows show as boxes?
None of the text bows were made as bows. They are digits and letters from other writing systems that happen to curl the right way, so they only show if the reader’s phone has a font for that script. ୨୧ and ౨ৎ are safe almost everywhere; 𐙚 often turns into a box.
| Bow | What it really is | Added | Box risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| ୨୧ | Oriya digits two and one | 1993 | Low |
| ౨ৎ | Telugu digit two and the Bengali letter khanda ta | 1993 and 2005 | Low |
| 𝜗𝜚 | Maths symbols: italic theta and rho | 2001 | Low |
| ᧔♡᧓ | New Tai Lue digits four and three around a heart | 2005 | Medium |
| 𐙚 | Linear A sign A306, from an undeciphered script of ancient Crete | 2014 | High |
The year matters because a phone can only show characters its fonts include. A bow added in the 1990s is in nearly every font; a rare sign added in 2014 often isn’t. If a bow is part of your name, pick a low-risk one.
How do I type a bow on my phone?
Open the emoji keyboard on iPhone or Android and search “ribbon” to find 🎀. Text bows like ୨୧ aren’t on any keyboard, so copy them from this page and save them as a text shortcut on your phone to type them in future.
- iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement → +. Paste the bow as the phrase and pick a shortcut like
bow1. - Android (Gboard): Gboard settings → Dictionary → Personal dictionary, then add the bow with a shortcut.
Bow, bow and arrow, or bowing?
🏹 is Bow and Arrow, added in 2015: archery, Cupid or the Sagittarius zodiac sign. 🙇 is Person Bowing Deeply, from 2010: an apology, a big thank-you or a sign of respect. Neither is a ribbon bow, so for the cute kind use 🎀 or the text bows on this page.
Three bios built from bows
Our own examples, to show how a bow or two can carry a whole profile:
Bows and hearts go together. For ♡, 🩷 and the rest, see the heart symbols page. Want the name itself to look fancy too? Write it in the cursive font generator, then paste it into “Frame a name” above. For bio layouts and which profile fields accept symbols, the Instagram fonts guide has the details.