Seems like ne "" is what I was looking for. :)

Be careful. Anonymonk's benchmark is conflating an aweful lot of other stuff in with the actual code you are concerned about.

I believe (but I'm open to correction), this to be a far better benchmark, and it shows a radically different result. It might just set your mind at ease. (Or not!):

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw( cmpthese );

# Make bytes:: functions available, but use character semantics.
use bytes ();

our $smileys = "\x{263a}" x 10_000;
our $empty = "\x{263a}"; chop $empty;

cmpthese -1, {   
    bytes => q{
        my $c=0;
        ( bytes::length($empty) or bytes::length($smileys) ) and ++$c 
+for 1 .. 1000;
    },
    utf8 => q{
        my $c=0;
        ( length($empty) or length($smileys) ) and ++$c for 1 .. 1000;
    },
    ord => q{
        my $c=0;
        ( ord( $empty ) or ord( $smileys ) ) and ++$c for 1 .. 1000;
    },
    'ne""' => q{
        my $c=0;
        ( $empty ne '' or $smileys ne '' ) and ++$c for 1 .. 1000;
    },
};

__END__
C:\test>junk8
        Rate bytes   ord  ne""  utf8
bytes 1379/s    --  -72%  -75%  -76%
ord   4992/s  262%    --  -10%  -13%
ne""  5566/s  304%   12%    --   -3%
utf8  5757/s  317%   15%    3%    --
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