Background: I just ran into a problem with iPhone emoji characters being saved into MySQL. The text was cut off after the first emoji character. After some research I found which explains how it works: http://mzsanford.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/mysql-and-unicode/ The recommendation is to use MySQL 5.5, and the "utf8mb4" encoding. Suggestion: Make "utf8mb4" the default encoding for MySQL 5.5 and up