Their name happened to come up in a report grid module from a custom query, and the emoji is still there. Well, it looks fine on the page in Arena. It lost it and turned into code when I exported to excel ...no surprise.
But, I'm having one of those moments when you start thinking about the potential of this new found thing. I've used images of colored flags and tiny icons in report grids before to help highlight, identify, and summarize data. Looks like you could use emojis in some of those places. Hmmm.
After a few quick tests, it looks like you can use  followed by the rest of the emoji code after the 1F in HTML to display the emoji. For example:
CASE WHEN flower=1 THEN '🌻' ELSE '' END AS flower_when_needed
https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
I am probably more excited about this than what should be normal. But, it's the little things.