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A black skull and crossbones in a red-bordered diamond, the GHS symbol for acute toxicity.
Also known as: Acute toxicity pictogram, GHS06
One of nine official GHS pictograms, warning that a substance or mixture is acutely toxic and can cause death or serious harm at low exposure.
Warns that a substance or mixture is acutely toxic and can cause death or serious poisoning even from a single, low-level exposure.
The skull-and-crossbones motif itself long predates GHS as a general, informal symbol of danger, poison or death, used on poison bottles and pirate flags for centuries before its specific adoption into the GHS standard in 2003.
This entry covers the specific, official GHS pictogram; the much older and broader informal use of skull-and-crossbones imagery as a general danger symbol is a related but distinct tradition, not itself GHS-governed.
Contexts: History
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 acute toxicity in categories 1 to 3 — that is, substances that can kill or seriously harm from a single short exposure by swallowing, skin contact or breathing. 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 acute toxicity the predecessor was the orange square skull and crossbones, coded T for toxic and T+ for very toxic.
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 toxic symbol (pre-2015 European supply label)
The same skull and crossed bones on an orange-yellow square with the letter code T or T+, used on European supply labels until 1 June 2015.
A black silhouette of a human skull above two crossed long bones, inside a diamond outlined in red.
The skull warns about one exposure; the silhouette with the starburst warns about what repeated exposure does over years.