That "wide character" might be not the smilie, but one (actually, three) of the bytes it is encoded with.
"F0.9F.98.80" is what sprintf( "%vX", $text) would output for e.g. $text = "\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH}\x9F\x98\x80"; but for $text = "\N{GRINNING FACE}" it should instead show "1F600".

a) What if instead of sprintf( "%vX", $text) (or additionally) try 
{
    use charnames ':full';
    use feature 'say';
    for my $c ( split //, $text ) {
            say Dumper $c, ord $c, charnames::viacode( ord $c );
        }
}

[download]
b) You could feed "Test \N{GRINNING FACE}" to your test program (for Perl older than 5.16, you need an explicit use charnames; for the \N escape to work).

I suspect that your console output accidentally uses the same (wrong) encoding as the database input, so it looks right…

In reply to Re^3: Encoding of emoji character by soonix
in thread Encoding of emoji character by dcunningham

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