About Glowing Star
Glowing Star is the Unicode character 🌟 at codepoint U+1F31F in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
The twinkling one of several stars. U+1F31F sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. Its single chart annotation is a cross-reference to white star, U+2606 — a text character with no emoji property, whose own entry points back here and also at star, U+2B50 WHITE MEDIUM STAR, the plain gold star CLDR simply calls star. So three of the standard's stars are wired together by cross-reference and only two of the three are emoji. Unicode's test data files this one under sky and weather, a subgroup of forty-seven fully qualified entries. CLDR's keywords are glittery, glow, glowing, night, shining, sparkle, star and win.
Typical uses
- Marking something as new, standout or featured, which is how it reads in practice
- Night-sky and sparkle contexts, which the keywords lead with
- Anything celebratory, where the keyword win applies
At a glance
- U+1F31F, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- Cross-referenced to U+2606 WHITE STAR, which is not an emoji
- U+2B50 WHITE MEDIUM STAR is the plain star; this one carries the bursts
- No HTML named entity. Write 🌟 or 🌟
Historical Notes
Origins
Which star means what, and how the drawings drifted apart, is not something the chart takes up: it records the cross-reference and nothing more.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. Its subgroup, sky and weather, is one of the larger ones in the standard's test data — forty-seven fully qualified entries, twenty-nine of them single codepoints and the rest sequences.
Three stars and one triangle of cross-references
U+2606 WHITE STAR is a text character in a text block. Its chart entry carries three cross-references: to a stress-outlined white star, to U+2B50 WHITE MEDIUM STAR, and to this character. U+2B50's entry points back to U+2606. So the standard has drawn the family relationship explicitly, and the useful part for a writer is what it implies: U+2606 will render in the surrounding font's colour like a letter, while the other two arrive as pictures. Choosing between them is a choice about presentation before it is a choice about meaning.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Glowing Star
To use the Glowing Star symbol (🌟) in HTML, insert the
entity 🌟 directly into your markup. The decimal entity 🌟 works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\1F31F';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F31F}' evaluates to 🌟. In Python source, write '\U0001F31F'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 8C 9F as UTF-8 bytes and D83C DF1F as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 127775.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.
Things to know
- U+2606 WHITE STAR is not an emoji and takes the text colour. U+2B50 and this character both default to emoji presentation.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83C DF1F in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- If a document is already using U+2B50 for ratings, this one reads as a different signal rather than a brighter version of the same one.
- No named HTML entity. Write 🌟 or 🌟.
In the Wild
Where a person types this character rather than a file defining it, it is overwhelmingly in technical documentation. A long Node.js best-practices guide uses it as a marker on updated sections — a heading, then a glowing star, then the word new, fourteen times over. A component-development project's readme uses it once in a contributing note, and a large list of programming resources uses it once as a section heading before the words Special Thanks.
Against that, an encyclopaedia article on stars contains none of it, and neither does an article on star shapes in art. The character is doing work in developer documentation and none at all in prose about astronomy.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
What is the difference between this and the plain star?
U+2B50 WHITE MEDIUM STAR is the plain gold star. This one carries the bursts and is cross-referenced to U+2606 WHITE STAR, which is a text character.
Which star should I use for a rating?
Whichever your interface already uses consistently. The standard does not assign that job to any of them.
Is U+2606 an emoji?
No. It carries no emoji property and renders in the text colour.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 🌟 or 🌟.