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An image of a substance corroding a surface and a hand, in a red-bordered diamond — the GHS symbol for corrosive hazard.
Also known as: Corrosive pictogram, GHS05
One of nine official GHS pictograms, warning that a substance or mixture causes severe skin burns/eye damage, or is corrosive to metals.
Warns that a substance or mixture causes severe skin burns and eye damage, or is corrosive to metals.
Appears on the outer packaging of a supplied chemical and again in section 2 of its safety data sheet, so a reader who has the sheet can check the label against it. On a product sold in the European Union or Great Britain it is not decoration: the supplier is required to show the pictogram the classification calls for.
European Union and Great Britain · Contexts: Packaging, Laboratory
Covers skin corrosion, serious eye damage, and corrosivity to metals — the last of which is a hazard to equipment rather than to a person, and is why a substance can carry this pictogram without being dangerous to touch through gloves. One pictogram can stand for several distinct hazard classes, which is why the pictogram alone never tells you the whole story — the hazard statements printed beside it do.
Contexts: Packaging, Laboratory
Is a *supply* label. A drum or tank in transit carries a differently shaped and coloured label for the same hazard under the transport rules, and the two schemes coexist — a package can lawfully carry both at once.
Contexts: Packaging
The European scheme it replaced used an orange square with a black symbol and a letter code. Orange-square labelling stopped being lawful for the supply of mixtures in the European Union on 1 June 2015, so a container still showing one is either old stock or outside the scheme. For corrosivity the predecessor was the orange square showing acid burning a hand and a surface, coded C.
European Union · European Union, until 1 June 2015 · Contexts: Packaging
Related forms that are not treated as separate canonical symbols — see our variant rules.
Orange square corrosive symbol (pre-2015 European supply label)
The same two streams of liquid burning a hand and a surface, on an orange-yellow square with the letter code C, used on European supply labels until 1 June 2015.
A black illustration of liquid dripping from two test tubes onto a hand and a flat surface, both shown corroding, inside a diamond outlined in red.