The 150 character budget, spent properly
Instagram gives a bio 150 characters and counts everything: letters, spaces, emoji and every decorative symbol. A single ornate divider can take 20 of them, so two dividers and a heart leave you about 110 characters for anything you actually wanted to say. Most truncated bios are not bad writing, they are decoration that quietly ate the budget.
A workable split is roughly 100 characters of real information and 50 of structure and decoration. Write the plain version first, check it in the counter above, then decorate with whatever is left rather than the other way round.
Keep the first line plain
The first line of a bio is the part that shows up in Instagram search results and in the preview when somebody shares your profile. Filling it with symbols means the one line most likely to be read by a stranger tells them nothing. Put your name or what you do there, and start decorating from line two.
Line breaks, and why they disappear
Multi-line bios are the most common thing people fail to reproduce. Instagram accepts line breaks but some versions of the app strip them if you paste and save immediately. Paste the text, tap elsewhere to dismiss the keyboard, then save. Editing from a desktop browser is the most reliable route of all, and the bio you save there shows correctly in the app afterwards.
What the bio is for, by account type
A personal account can afford to be purely decorative, because nobody arrives needing information from it. A creator account has one job: say what you make in the first line, because that is what decides whether a stranger follows. A business account has a different job again, which is to answer where you are, what you sell and how to reach you, and decoration actively gets in the way of all three.
The mistake is using a personal-account bio on a business account. Four ornate dividers look charming on a private profile and look careless on a shop, where a customer is scanning for opening hours. If the account exists to be found by strangers, spend the 150 characters on facts and use one marker per line as the only decoration.
Things worth leaving out
Hashtags in a bio are not clickable in the way people assume and mostly waste characters. A bare email address is worth less than it looks, since it is not tappable on every surface. Long inspirational quotes read as filler in a space this small, and a list of the countries you have visited ages faster than anything else people put in a bio.
The one genuinely wasted line is a link written as plain text. Instagram gives you a real link field directly above the bio, and a pasted URL in the bio body is not clickable, so it consumes characters and achieves nothing. Point at the link field with an arrow instead and reclaim the space.
What these symbols actually are
None of this is a font. Every mark here is a standard Unicode character, which is precisely why it survives being pasted into Instagram at all: the app stores text, not styling. The delicate ones such as ୨୧ and 𐙚 come from scripts unrelated to decoration, borrowed purely for their shape, which also means a device without that script installed will draw an empty rectangle instead.
That is the trade-off worth understanding before you commit to one. The rarer the symbol, the more distinctive it looks and the more likely some fraction of your visitors see a box. ✦ ♡ ✧ ⋆ and · are safe essentially everywhere.