Four Leaf Clover Emoji

A four-leaf clover, the rare mutant cousin of the ordinary three-leaf variety, used to wish luck or mark a fortunate moment. 🍀 is the luck emoji. Drop it before an exam, a job interview, a ticket drawing, or a sports game and the meaning lands without explanation.

People also use it as a general feel-good marker in captions and bios. A walk in the park, a spring aesthetic, a manifestation post on TikTok. The green color and low emotional temperature make it safe for almost any context except, arguably, work email.

Not a shamrock. This is the permanent footnote of this emoji. 🍀 is a four-leaf clover (luck). ☘️ is a shamrock (three leaves, Ireland, St. Patrick's Day). They look nearly identical on a phone screen, so people use 🍀 for Ireland constantly. ABC News ran a piece specifically to tell people they were posting the wrong one on March 17. Years later, nobody listens.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) and included in the first Emoji 1.0 set in 2015.

The 🍀 has drifted in usage layer by layer. Older users (Gen X, Boomers) still send it the straightforward way: "Good luck with surgery 🍀." Millennials lean into milestones, job interviews, exam days, pregnancy announcements. Gen Z on TikTok and Instagram has pulled it into manifestation culture where it pairs with ✨ to mean "good energy incoming," often on aesthetic videos, study motivation, or spiritual content.

Gamers and sports-betting Twitter use it before a match or a parlay. Crypto and daytrading accounts caption a winning screenshot with 🍀 ironically, because they know luck had more to do with it than skill. On Bumble and Hinge bios it signals "positive vibes only" without committing to anything specific, which is the emoji's whole personality.

Because the color is spring green, it also belongs to the cottagecore, nature-core, and early-spring aesthetic group alongside 🌱 🌿 🌸. And every March it gets yanked into St. Patrick's Day rotation even though ☘️ is technically correct.

The earliest written claim that four-leaf clovers are lucky comes from Sir John Melton in 1620, who wrote that finding one meant "you shall in a small while after find some good thing." That's roughly four hundred years of continuous belief.

The folklore is older than the Melton reference, though, with several competing origin stories. In Christian Europe, one legend says Eve plucked a four-leaf clover as a keepsake when she was expelled from the Garden of Eden, making the plant a literal souvenir of paradise. Celtic druids in pre-Christian Britain and Ireland reportedly used four-leaf clovers as protective charms against evil spirits, a tradition older than the shamrock's association with St. Patrick.

English children in the 1600s and 1700s carried them in pockets to see fairies. The symbolic assignment of faith, hope, love, and luck to the four leaves came later, when the plant's Christian associations got layered onto its pagan origins.

The genetic story is short: a four-leaf clover is a mutation of Trifolium repens (white clover), caused by a recessive gene that only expresses when environmental conditions line up. That's why they tend to cluster. Find one, check the patch.

1. 2010Added to Unicode 6.0 as U+1F340 FOUR LEAF CLOVER.
2. 2015Included in the first Emoji 1.0 spec.
3. 2017Apple redesigned the emoji on iOS 10.2 with more symmetric leaves and brighter saturation, the design still in use today.
4. 2023Wisconsin's Gabriella Gerhardt broke the [Guinness record](https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2023/02/27/Guinness-World-Records-collection-four-leaf-clovers/5041677516148/) for largest four-leaf clover collection with 118,791 clovers.

Germany: Glücksklee. The four-leaf clover is arguably a bigger symbol in German New Year culture than in Irish St. Patrick's culture. Glücksklee ("lucky clover") is one of the traditional Glücksbringer (luck-bringers), alongside the marzipan pig, ladybug, chimney sweep, and horseshoe. Small potted Glücksklee plants are sold in German grocery stores in late December and given as gifts on New Year's Eve. Notably, the German Glücksklee is usually Oxalis tetraphylla, the Iron Cross plant, not a true Trifolium clover. Different plant, same emoji.

Ireland: not the national symbol. This surprises people. In Ireland, the shamrock ☘️ is the national symbol. The four-leaf clover is a generic lucky mutation, not specifically Irish. Sending 🍀 to an Irish person on St. Patrick's Day lands like sending a pumpkin spice latte on Thanksgiving, technically on-theme but slightly off.

Japan: wish plant. In Japan the four-leaf clover carries wishful meaning and is linked culturally to Tanabata, the wish-writing festival. It shows up in shōjo manga and anime as a soft romantic motif.

United States: Lucky Charms cereal. For a huge part of the American population, the primary association with the four-leaf clover isn't folklore at all, it's the green marshmallow in Lucky Charms, first launched in 1964 with Lucky the Leprechaun) on the box.

• •The first written claim that four-leaf clovers bring luck is from Sir John Melton in 1620. That's older than most national flags on Earth.
• •Wisconsin's Gabriella Gerhardt holds five Guinness World Records for four-leaf clover hunting, including 118,791 four-leaf clovers collected total, 451 found in one hour, and 887 in eight hours.
• •She also holds the records for most 6-leaf clovers (1,437) and most 7-leaf clovers (209) collected. The previous 7-leaf record was 17.
• •The Germany tradition of gifting Glücksklee on New Year's usually uses Oxalis tetraphylla (Iron Cross plant), not actual clover. Different genus, different continent, same symbolism.
• •In folklore, each leaf supposedly stands for something: faith, hope, love, and luck. This assignment is Christian-era, older folk traditions just considered the plant generally protective.
• •The song "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" was written in 1927, hit #1 again in 1948, and still shows up in Looney Tunes cartoons.
• •A true four-leaf clover is a mutation of Trifolium repens (white clover). Most commercially sold "lucky clover" plants are actually Oxalis, an unrelated species with a similar shape.
• •Apple iOS 10.2 redesigned 🍀 in 2017 to make the four leaves perfectly symmetric. Before that the Apple version had asymmetrical leaves closer to real white clover.
• •The world record for most leaves on a single clover stem is 63 leaves, set by Yoshiharu Watanabe of Nasushiobara, Tochigi, Japan on August 2, 2023. The previous record (56 leaves) was set by Shigeo Obara of Hanamaki, Iwate in 2009, who beat his own 21-leaf record from 2008.
• •Americans spent $7.2 billion on St Patrick's Day in 2024 according to the National Retail Federation. The retail association tracks 162 million celebrants and a per-person average of $44.40, much of it on green merchandise that uses 🍀 instead of the technically correct ☘️.

• •Lucky Charms cereal, launched by General Mills in 1964, has Lucky the Leprechaun in a green top hat with a four-leaf clover on the band. The original marshmallows were pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers. For millions of Americans this is the primary clover association, not Irish folklore.
• •"I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" is a 1927 Tin Pan Alley standard by Mort Dixon and Harry M. Woods. It became a huge hit again in 1948 and is still used as background music in Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
• •The Boston Celtics logo features a leprechaun spinning a basketball on a shamrock. The team uses both three-leaf and four-leaf clover imagery across merchandise, which adds to the general public confusion.
• •In manga and anime, the four-leaf clover recurs as a wish motif. The shōjo series Clover) by CLAMP uses it as its central symbol.