Using the Skull Symbol
The skull and crossbones has warned of death for centuries: on gravestones, on pirate flags, and since the 1800s on bottles of poison. The Globally Harmonized System still uses it as the pictogram for substances that are acutely toxic, drawn in black inside a red diamond. Unicode added the character as ☠ at U+2620 in 1993 as a plain text glyph, and when emoji arrived it received a coloured presentation too, while a separate, much more popular skull 💀 was encoded at U+1F480 as an emoji only.
Text glyph or emoji
The bare character ☠ takes the colour of the surrounding text, so it looks like part of the sentence: black on a light page, white on a dark one. Adding the variation selector U+FE0F after it produces ☠️, and the device swaps in its full-colour emoji artwork, usually a white skull on a black or grey square. Both forms share the same code point, so a search for one matches the other. Typing the selector by hand is awkward, which is why this page offers both versions ready to paste. To force the text look where a keyboard insists on emoji, the text-style selector U+FE0E can be appended instead, though not every app honours it.
☠ versus 💀
The two are not interchangeable in tone. The crossbones version signals danger, poison, piracy or a gothic aesthetic. The plain skull 💀 became internet shorthand for laughing so hard you died, a successor to 😂, and it dominates comment sections and captions. Using ☠ where friends expect 💀 reads as oddly serious; using 💀 on a hazard label reads as a joke. Pick by meaning first and appearance second.
Where it renders
The text form lives in the Miscellaneous Symbols block that every major system font covers, so it displays on old Android phones, e-readers and forum software that predate emoji. The emoji forms need an emoji font, which every phone from the last decade has. The pirate flag 🏴☠️ is a joined sequence of a black flag and ☠️; on devices that do not know the sequence it splits into a flag followed by a skull, which is harmless but looks unintended.
Handles, bios and moderation
Gamers, metal and horror accounts, and Halloween profiles use ☠ as a divider or a prefix on a display name, often alongside ☣ and ☢. It passes most username filters that allow Unicode and shows up fine in Discord and Twitch. Bear in mind that some platforms and workplaces treat the crossbones as a threat indicator in reports, so a friendly skull in a message can be read differently by a moderator than by a friend; the 💀 laughing skull rarely raises that flag. Combine ☠ with the sharp letterforms of the gothic fonts generator or the warning symbol for a caution-tape look, and browse the cross symbols page for the matching ✞ ✟ shapes that horror bios pair with it.