If you write your blog posts in Markdown and build your site with Jekyll, you may have noticed that your footnote return links (represented by the “↩︎” Unicode arrow) render as the unsightly ↩️ emoji on iOS. It’s possible that this issue may affect other Markdown-oriented static site generators as well, as I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it on sites built with Hugo, 11ty, and Astro. Ben Dodson posted a _config.yml solution ten years ago that may still work, but I also have a CSS solution I’d like to share that I know definitely works as of 2026.
If we look at the HTML generated by Jekyll for footnote return links, we see the following:
<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a>
Since the footnote return link has a class (reversefootnote), we can easily style it with CSS! I’m not entirely sure why iOS renders basic Unicode arrows as emoji, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the way it handles emoji for certain font families, as you can fix the issue by adding the following to your CSS file:
.reversefootnote {
font-family: monospace;
}
And just like that, no more hideous ↩️ in your footnotes section.
I hope this helps someone out there who takes as much offense to the ↩️ emoji as I do. 😉 May your footnotes be beautiful again!