Three horizontal stripes, blue, magenta and dark purple, with a white chevron at the hoist holding a gold heart. Designed by Red Howell and chosen on 23 November 2022 by a community vote of 30,827 people, run by the PolyamProud committee. The colour values are the committee's own published specification. The 1995 pi flag is covered below and is still in use.
Pi Flag (Jim Evans, 1995), superseded
Three horizontal stripes, blue for openness and honesty, red for love and passion, black for solidarity with people who have to keep their relationships hidden, with the Greek letter pi in the centre. Pi is the first letter of "polyamory" written with the Greek prefix; as a mathematical constant it is infinite and non-repeating, a play on "infinite love." It was the de facto standard for nearly three decades and it is still the flag most people recognise.
The PolyamProud committee published its reasons for replacing it. The colours vibrate against each other where the opposing light frequencies meet, which makes the flag hard to look at and, in the committee's words, aggressive and often even uncomfortable to our eyes. The pi symbol's connection to polyamory is not obvious to anybody who has not been told; Evans chose it because it was the first letter of the word and it was available in Microsoft Paint. And pi's associations are with mathematics and engineering rather than with anything the community means by the word.
A fourth objection circulates widely, that the palette resembles some unrelated flags including far-right ones, sometimes with the further claim that this distressed polyamorous people of colour. The committee does not give that reason and we have not found a source for it that we can check, so we record it as something people say rather than as a fact.
Infinity Heart Variant (University of Northern Colorado Poly Community, 2017)
Identical three-stripe layout with the pi symbol replaced by a white infinity heart. This version coexisted with the original but neither achieved universal acceptance.
PolyamProud Tricolour (Red Howell, 2022), current
Chosen by a vote of 30,827 participants after a year-long redesign process run by the PolyamProud committee, whose seven members were drawn from Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, India, the Netherlands and the United States. Three stripes, cyan blue, magenta and dark purple, with a white chevron holding a gold heart. Red Howell: "The intention was to create a simple, bold tricolor, with a contemporary approach to traditional vexillological elements from the original Pi flag." The design was released into the public domain.
The pi flag is still widely flown, and nobody can mandate a flag for a community. This guide leads with the 2022 design because it replaced the pi flag for reasons the committee set out, rather than because it is the better known of the two, which it is not.
