Teardrop-Spoked Asterisk

It is a decorative typographical flourish rather than an emotional message. People often use ✻ to frame profile bios, break up lines of text, or act as an elegant bullet point in lists. Because each petal tapers outward like a droplet or teardrop, it provides a distinct visual style compared to a standard typewriter asterisk (*).

The symbol originates in print typography as part of Hermann Zapf's ITC Zapf Dingbats series released in 1978, and was encoded in Unicode 1.1 in 1993. Unlike emoji stars, ✻ is a text symbol: its shape depends on the font used, and its color usually follows ordinary text styling.