Assegai hands are a stylistic signature of Laurent Ferrier, not a generic hand type: they were born within that manufacture and have remained there. The name comes from the assegai, the hunting spear of the Zulu, and describes exactly what you see: a very tapered profile that starts wide at the base and ends in an almost surgical point. They are not feuille in the traditional sense of the term, although that's where they come from. They are feuille taken to a further degree of abstraction, with more taut geometry and less ornamental character.
Production requires precision micro-machining and manual work. Each hand is finished by hand: in steel models you find them painted white or treated with ruthenium, in gold ones they are in polished solid white gold. In Sport models, some variants integrate areas of luminescent material without compromising the profile: a compromise that in other contexts would be banal, here it requires redesigning the internal geometry of the hand itself. The Navy & Orange version features Assegai hands in white gold coated with orange. In the Classic Traveller Globe Night Blue they are curved to visually harmonize with the central globe.
The term has entered enthusiasts' usage as shorthand to immediately recognize a Laurent Ferrier piece even in photos: together with the word Galet — the pebble, the rounded edge without sharp angles — it forms the aesthetic vocabulary that defines the manufacture's identity. This type of formal coherence between hands and case is rare: usually hands are chosen from a supplier catalog, here they are designed for each individual variant of the dial.
From the workbench I've seen many imitations of the tapered profile, but almost none withstand live comparison: the difference lies in the quality of the surfaces, in the way light flows along the hand's plane without discontinuity. It's a matter of finishing, not form.