Technical answer: Star = U+2B50 which is less than U+FFFF Sunglasses = U+1F576 which is greater than U+FFFF The details you might be missing is that some emo

Technical answer: Star = U+2B50 which is less than U+FFFF Sunglasses = U+1F576 which is greater than U+FFFF The details you might be missing is that some emoji existed in Unicode before color graphic "emoji" was actually a thing. The stars (and hearts) are examples of ones which used to be just a basic shape in the font but now are commonly full color graphical "images".