Symbol for protection

The nazar 🧿 and the evil eye

Belief in the evil eye, the idea that an envious look can cause harm, is found around the Mediterranean, the Middle East and South Asia. The blue glass bead with concentric rings, called a nazar in Turkish and a mati in Greek, is meant to reflect that gaze back. You see it on doorways, jewellery and baby clothes. Unicode added it as “nazar amulet” in 2018, and people now add 🧿 to posts to ward off jealousy or bad luck.

The hamsa 🪬

The hamsa is an open hand, often with an eye in the palm, used as an amulet in North Africa and the Middle East by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike. It is also called the Hand of Fatima or the Hand of Miriam, depending on the tradition. The emoji arrived in 2021, so older phones may not display it. Other religious signs are in our religious symbols collection.

The Eye of Horus 𓂀

In ancient Egypt the wedjat, or Eye of Horus, was a symbol of protection, healing and royal power. According to myth, Horus’s eye was injured in a fight and restored, so amulets of the eye were placed with the dead and worn by the living. 𓂀 is the actual hieroglyph (D010 in Gardiner’s list), encoded in Unicode’s Egyptian Hieroglyphs block; it needs a font with hieroglyph support, such as Segoe UI Historic on Windows.

The shield and the pentagram

A shield 🛡️ is the plainest protection symbol, used in heraldry, police badges and security software alike. The pentagram ⛤ is more complicated. In modern Wicca the upright pentagram in a circle is a protective sign, but in popular culture the inverted pentagram is linked with Satanism, so the same shape can be read very differently.

Protective charms are close cousins of good-luck charms; see our symbols for luck and the symbols for strength.