Text flowers vs flower emoji
Text flowers such as ✿ (black florette), ❀ (white florette), ❁ and ✾ come from the Dingbats block, which Unicode based on the Zapf Dingbats font. They behave like letters: they take your text color and size, look much the same in every app and fit neatly into usernames.
Flower emoji like 🌸 🌷 🌻 are always in color and look a little different on every phone. Use text flowers for clean, minimal decoration and emoji when you want color.
Surprising flower look-alikes
⚘ is the one character officially named "flower". ❦ and ❧ are floral hearts, also called hederas or ivy leaves, old printers' ornaments for separating paragraphs. ⁕ is the "flower punctuation mark", and ⚜︎ is the fleur-de-lis, a stylized lily linked to French royalty and to Scouting.
The popular ꕥ and ꕤ are not flowers at all: they are syllables of the Vai script from Liberia that happen to look like blossoms. They are real letters, so a few older devices may not have a font for them.
What flower emoji mean
🌸 (cherry blossom) stands for spring, Japan and anything cute. 🌹 is romance (see the rose symbols), 🥀 is heartbreak, 🌻 is happiness, and 🪷 the lotus is an important symbol in Buddhism and Hinduism. 💮 (white flower) comes from Japan, where a flower stamp means "well done" on schoolwork.
For bios, ✿❀❁ and the kaomoji (◕‿◕✿) are classics. Add bows from the bow symbols or wings from the butterfly symbols for a softer look.
How to type a flower symbol
In Microsoft Word, type 273F and press Alt + X for ✿, or 2740 for ❀. For flower emoji, search the emoji keyboard for "flower", or press Windows + . on a PC and Control + Command + Space on a Mac.