We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
A black flame above a black circle in a red-bordered diamond, the GHS symbol for oxidizing hazard.
Also known as: Oxidizing pictogram, GHS03
One of nine official GHS pictograms, warning that a substance or mixture is an oxidizer — it may cause or intensify fire even though it is not itself combustible.
Warns that a substance or mixture is an oxidizer, capable of causing or intensifying fire in other materials even though it may not itself be combustible.
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 oxidising gases, oxidising liquids and oxidising solids — substances that may cause or intensify a fire in other materials, whether or not they burn themselves. 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 oxidisers the predecessor was the orange square flame over a circle, coded O.
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 oxidising symbol (pre-2015 European supply label)
The same flame-over-circle drawing on an orange-yellow square with the letter code O, used on European supply labels until 1 June 2015.
A black silhouette of a flame directly above a black circle, inside a diamond outlined in red.
The circle is the whole difference: it marks a substance that feeds a fire rather than one that catches.
Both belong to the GHS hazard pictograms system.