Concerning this issue please also consider Mathias Bynens's article from 2012 http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4 http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-u

Concerning this issue please also consider Mathias Bynens's article from 2012 http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4 http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4 It has a good treatment of how to migrate encoding-wise which includes additional precautions not mentioned in the originally linked article.