Rainbow Emoji

A rainbow arching across the sky. 🌈 carries more cultural weight per pixel than almost any other emoji, bridging at least three major symbolic traditions: LGBTQ+ pride), hope after hardship, and pet memorials).

Added in Unicode 6.0 (2010). The rainbow became the definitive LGBTQ+ symbol through Gilbert Baker), a drag queen and US Army veteran who hand-dyed the first two pride flags for the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Baker chose the rainbow because, as he said, "it's a natural flag, it's from the sky." The original flag had eight stripes: hot pink (sexuality), red (life), orange (healing), yellow (sunlight), green (nature), turquoise (art/magic), indigo (harmony), and violet (spirit). Hot pink was dropped first because the fabric was hard to mass-produce. Turquoise followed when Baker needed an even number for a street display.

Before Baker, rainbows symbolized hope and promise. The biblical rainbow represents God's covenant with Noah. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz (1939) became what some call the "gay national anthem," connecting rainbows to queer culture decades before Baker's flag. And the Rainbow Bridge), a prose poem about pets waiting in paradise, makes 🌈 the go-to memorial emoji for pet loss. All of these layers live inside one codepoint.

🌈 shifts meaning by calendar and context. During June (Pride Month), usage spikes roughly 300% as it floods bios, posts, and corporate branding. Adding 🌈 to your social media bio is widely understood as signaling LGBTQ+ support.

The rest of the year, 🌈 is more evenly split. Weather posts use it literally. Pet owners use 🌈🐾 for memorials. Optimistic captions use it as shorthand for "things are looking up." There's also the explicit pride flag emoji 🏳️‍🌈 (added in 2016), which is unambiguously LGBTQ+, leaving 🌈 as the more versatile option.

By 2025, corporate rainbow usage has become a fraught topic. Major brands pulled back from Pride campaigns amid political pressure, and the term "rainbow washing" entered mainstream vocabulary. The emoji remains powerful precisely because it's personal, not corporate.

• 📜
  Aristotle (4th c. BCE): Counted five principal chromatic colors in De Sensu, framed as proportional mixtures like musical harmonies
• 🔬
  Newton (1672): First Opticks paper listed five spectral colors. No indigo.
• 🎼
  Newton (1675): Revised to seven, adding orange and indigo to match the seven notes of the Dorian scale
• 🌐
  Modern variation: Many cultures see four to six bands. The 'true' count is a function of language, not eyesight.

The rainbow emoji draws from traditions spanning millennia, but its modern cultural weight comes primarily from one person.

Gilbert Baker) (1951-2017) was a drag queen and US Army veteran turned artist. Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US, urged Baker to create a symbol of pride for the gay community. Baker hand-dyed the first two flags with volunteers for the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, choosing the rainbow because "it's a natural flag, it's from the sky."

The original flag had eight stripes: hot pink (sexuality), red (life), orange (healing), yellow (sunlight), green (nature), turquoise (art/magic), indigo (harmony), and violet (spirit). Hot pink was dropped first because the fabric was hard to mass-produce. Turquoise followed in 1979 when Baker needed an even number of stripes for display on San Francisco's Market Street lampposts.

The Wizard of Oz connection runs deeper than most people realize. Judy Garland became a gay icon decades before Baker's flag. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was called the "gay national anthem." The phrase "friend of Dorothy" became code for being gay. Garland's funeral was on June 27, 1969; the Stonewall riots started hours later. Historians debate whether the timing was coincidence or catalyst, but the cultural resonance between rainbows and queer liberation predates Baker's flag by decades.

The emoji 🌈 was approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010). The explicit pride flag 🏳️‍🌈 wasn't added until 2016, meaning 🌈 carried the entire weight of LGBTQ+ emoji expression for six years.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F308U+1F308 RAINBOW. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. The explicit pride flag 🏳️‍🌈 wasn't added until Unicode 9.0 (2016) as a ZWJ sequence combining 🏳️ and 🌈, meaning for six years 🌈 was the only emoji option for LGBTQ+ pride.

1. 1939'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' debuts in The Wizard of Oz, later called the 'gay national anthem'
2. 1978Gilbert Baker hand-dyes the first 8-stripe rainbow pride flag for San Francisco Gay Freedom Day
3. 1979Flag reduced to 6 stripes (hot pink, turquoise dropped) for production reasons
4. 1994Baker creates mile-long rainbow flag for Stonewall's 25th anniversary, sets Guinness record
5. 2010🌈 approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F308 RAINBOW
6. 2015Marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges) triggers massive 🌈 spike; Facebook adds rainbow overlay
7. 2016🏳️‍🌈 Pride Flag emoji added as ZWJ sequence, giving LGBTQ+ an unambiguous option
8. 2017Gilbert Baker dies at 65. The Museum of Modern Art acquires the original rainbow flag design.

• 🏔️
  5,036 m altitude: Higher than any peak in continental Europe; oxygen at the summit is around 56% of sea level
• 🧊
  Glacier retreat ~2013: Ice cap melted through early 2010s, exposing the painted bedrock for the first time in modern memory
• 👥
  ~1M visitors/year: Peru's second-most-visited site after Machu Picchu within four years of opening
• 🟫
  Iron + sulfur + copper: Hematite (red), limonite/sulfur (yellow), chlorite/copper (green), manganese (lavender), white sandstone (cream)

• •The original 1978 pride flag had 8 colors, not 6. Hot pink (sexuality) and turquoise (magic/art) were dropped because the fabrics were hard to mass-produce. Baker hand-dyed the first flags with a team of volunteers including Lynn Segerblom.
• •Gilbert Baker) chose the rainbow because "it's a natural flag, it's from the sky." He served in the US Army before becoming a drag queen and activist. Harvey Milk personally asked him to create a symbol for the gay community.
• •The Rainbow Bridge poem) was written in 1959 by a 19-year-old Scottish woman named Edna Clyne-Rekhy after her Labrador Major died. Her authorship was only confirmed in 2023 by researcher Paul Koudounaris, after decades of the poem circulating anonymously through vet offices and internet forums.
• •For six years (2010-2016), 🌈 was the only emoji option for LGBTQ+ pride. The explicit pride flag 🏳️‍🌈 wasn't added until Unicode 9.0 as a ZWJ sequence combining 🏳️ and 🌈.
• •In 1994, Baker created a mile-long rainbow flag for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. It stretched from the UN building through New York streets and set a Guinness World Record.
• •The Wiphala flag of Andean Indigenous peoples uses rainbow colors in a checkerboard pattern and is an official national symbol of Bolivia. Rainbow flags as symbols of diversity and spirituality predate the LGBTQ+ pride flag by centuries across multiple cultures.
• •Judy Garland's funeral was on June 27, 1969. The Stonewall riots started hours later. Historians debate the connection, but no eyewitness accounts written at the time by identifiably gay witnesses mention Garland. The cultural link between rainbows and queer liberation through "Over the Rainbow" is real, even if the Stonewall timing may be coincidence.
• •Rainbow emoji usage spikes roughly 300% during Pride Month every June. NYC Pride saw a 30% spike in emoji-driven social engagement in 2025 despite the corporate pullback from rainbow branding.
• •In Chinese tradition, the rainbow represents a heavenly dragon and the union of yin and yang. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the "rainbow body" is the highest yogic state attainable. The LGBTQ+ association is the newest of many rainbow symbolisms across cultures.
• •🌈 powers a fourth major community most people never see: rainbow babies, children born after a miscarriage or stillbirth. The #rainbowbaby hashtag has over 6 million Instagram posts. A single 🌈 next to a baby name is often the only public acknowledgment a family ever makes about a prior loss.
• •Queer TikTok users have turned 🌈 into a plausible-deniability signal. Because the emoji doubles as weather, hope, and pet memorial, you can include it in a bio or caption and claim any meaning if an algorithm (or a relative) flags it. 🏳️‍🌈 offers no such cover, which is partly why 🌈 still outpaces it even in LGBTQ+ contexts.
• •The seven-color rainbow is a Newton invention from 1675. His original 1672 Opticks paper listed five colors. He inserted orange and indigo three years later so the count would match the seven notes of the Dorian musical scale. Indigo, the color most modern observers admit they cannot really distinguish from blue, exists in ROYGBIV largely because of a 17th-century musical analogy.
• •Vinicunca, the Rainbow Mountain of Peru, was hidden under glacier ice for most of recorded history. The ice retreated around 2013 and the iron-sulfur-copper bands underneath became visible. Within four years it was Peru's second-most-visited tourist site after Machu Picchu, drawing roughly a million visitors a year.
• •Russian has two basic color terms for blue, goluboy (light) and siniy (dark), and routinely lists eight bands in a rainbow. Modern Japanese teaches six. Traditional Hopi recognized four sky colors mapped to the cardinal directions. Newton's seven is a global outlier, not a universal count.

• •The Wizard of Oz) (1939): "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is one of the most famous songs in cinema. It represents hope and escape, and became a touchstone of queer culture through Judy Garland's status as a gay icon. The phrase "friend of Dorothy" became code for being gay.
• •Gilbert Baker) (1951-2017) created the rainbow pride flag in 1978 at Harvey Milk's request. It became one of the most recognized symbols in the world. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the original design.
• •Apple has released annual rainbow Pride Watch bands since 2016 and was one of the first major tech companies to march in Pride (2014, led by Tim Cook).

• •🌈 is U+1F308U+1F308. Unicode name: RAINBOW. Common shortcodes: :rainbow::rainbow: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •For the explicit LGBTQ+ pride flag, use 🏳️‍🌈 (ZWJ sequence: U+1F3F3 U+FE0F U+200D U+1F308U+1F3F3 U+FE0F U+200D U+1F308). For trans pride: 🏳️‍⚧️.
• •🌈 renders as a full arch on most platforms. Some older systems show a half-arch or weatherphenomenon-style rendering.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.