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Both are read as 'poison' and they mark opposite timescales of harm.
The skull warns about a single exposure that can kill or seriously harm now. The silhouette with the starburst warns about what repeated exposure does over years — cancer, genetic damage, harm to fertility or an unborn child, damage to an organ, or the danger of a liquid entering the lungs. Substituting one for the other changes whether the control needed is a spill procedure or decades of health surveillance, which is why this is the most consequential confusion in the set.
The skull warns about one exposure; the silhouette with the starburst warns about what repeated exposure does over years.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | GHS skull and crossbones pictogram | GHS health hazard pictogram |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | abstract | people and abstract |
| GHS skull and crossbones pictogram | GHS health hazard pictogram | |
|---|---|---|
| Timescale | One short exposure | Repeated or long-term exposure |
| Hazard classes | Acute toxicity, categories 1 to 3 | Carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, reproductive toxicity, respiratory sensitisation, specific target organ toxicity, aspiration hazard |
| Pre-2015 European mark | Orange square skull, coded T or T+ | None — the hazards were carried by risk phrases |
| Control it calls for | Containment, spill response, immediate first aid | Exposure limits, monitoring and long-term health surveillance |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with GHS health hazard pictogram — The skull warns about one exposure; the silhouette with the starburst warns about what repeated exposure does over years. | Commonly confused with GHS skull and crossbones pictogram — This one is about cumulative harm; the skull is about a single dose. |
UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) · retrieved 2026-07-27
CLP pictograms — hazard pictograms and what they mean
European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) · retrieved 2026-08-22
The regulator's own explanatory material rather than the legal text. Authoritative about how ECHA describes the pictograms to the public; the regulation governs the legal effect.
EUR-Lex (Publications Office of the European Union) · retrieved 2026-08-22
The European implementation of the UN GHS, not the GHS itself. Cited for what a pictogram legally means on a product sold in the EU and for the dates on which the older orange-square symbols stopped being lawful. It does not govern outside the EU/EEA, and the records say which claim is which.
A building's assembly point is a safe place to stand once you are outside. A ship's muster station is a staffed step in a procedure: you are counted against a roll, briefed, and if necessary allocated to a survival craft, which is why it has a letter or a number and appears on your cabin door card. Both are green, both show grouped figures, and both are called an assembly point in ordinary speech — and treating a muster station as somewhere merely to wait is the misunderstanding drills exist to correct.
The becquerel counts nuclear decays — one per second — and says nothing about harm. The sievert weights absorbed energy by the kind of radiation delivering it, and so estimates biological effect. A becquerel of one isotope and a becquerel of another can carry very different risk, which is exactly why exposure limits and medical doses are stated in sieverts and never in becquerels.
Count what is around the centre. Three solid blades radiating from a small disc is ionising radiation; three broken rings overlapping a central circle is biological hazard. They are the same size, the same colours and the same three-fold arrangement, which is why signage catalogues themselves get them wrong — and the responses could not be less alike. One calls for distance, shielding and time; the other for containment, disinfection and a disposal route.
The plain black flag excludes the competitor: their race is over. The black flag with an orange disc reports a mechanical problem that endangers others and sends the driver to the pits to have it fixed, after which they may rejoin. Both are shown with a number board, both are black, and confusing them costs a competitor a race they could have finished.