Sign of the horns: dark skin tone Emoji

People

A hand making the classic 'rock-on' gesture, featuring a dark skin tone, with the index finger and pinky extended while the middle and ring fingers are tucked against the thumb. This hand sign is universally recognized as a salute to heavy metal and hard rock music.

Usage Context

Widely used by music fans to express excitement at concerts or to show appreciation for a killer guitar riff. Beyond music, it serves as an enthusiastic sign of agreement, approval, or general 'badass' energy. It is often used in tandem with the 🤘 emoji or music-themed icons like 🎸 or 🔥.

History

While the gesture has long been used in various cultures for protection or warding off evil, it was popularized in global pop culture during the late 1970s and 80s by heavy metal vocalists like Ronnie James Dio. It became a permanent fixture of metal subculture before moving into digital communication with the inclusion of skin tone modifiers in Unicode 8.0 in 2015.

Details

Glyph

🤘🏿

Unicode

U+1F918 U+1F3FF

Shortcode

:emoji_u1f918_1f3ff:

HTML Entity

&#xD83E;&#xDD18;&#xD83C;&#xDFFF;

Specifications

Vendor Microsoft

Category People

Subcategory hand-fingers-partial

Unicode Version 6.0

Emoji Version 1.0

License MIT

Microsoft Fluent License

Emoji graphics by Microsoft. © Microsoft Corporation. Licensed under MIT. Excludes assets such as Clippy, flags, and trademarks.

Microsoft Fluent Emoji assets are licensed under the MIT License. Certain assets—such as Clippy, country flags, and Microsoft product/brand trademarks—are excluded from this license and may not be used without separate permission.

MIT License Fluent Emoji Repository