Skin Tone Variants
Leonard Nimoy needed a Vulcan greeting for "Amok Time," the 1967 episode that first took Spock home, and reached into his own childhood for it. As a boy in Boston he had been taken to an Orthodox synagogue and told not to look while the kohanim delivered the priestly blessing. He looked anyway, and saw them holding both hands up in a split-fingered shape forming the Hebrew letter shin — the initial of Shaddai, one of the names of God. He told the story in his 1975 memoir and again, on camera, in a 2013 oral history interview.
How it reached Unicode is less romantic. It arrived in 2014 not by fan petition but as a side effect of a project to encode the entire Wingdings and Webdings repertoire, which swept in roughly six hundred pictographs at once. Its formal name is still the deadpan RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS; "Vulcan salute" is only the label everyone actually uses.
Plenty of people cannot make the shape without setting their fingers first, which has been a working problem on set as well as off — William Shatner's fingers were reportedly tied with fishing line, and Zachary Quinto's were glued in position for the 2009 film after rubber bands failed. The emoji, mercifully, asks for no dexterity at all.
About Vulcan Salute
Vulcan Salute is the Unicode character 🖖 at codepoint U+1F596 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Vulcan Salute
To use the Vulcan Salute 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: '\1F596';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F596}' evaluates to 🖖. In Python source, write '\U0001F596'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 96 96 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DD96 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128406.
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.