MySQL can select litral emoji but wont store emoji into table - mysql

Question

I am trying to insert some emoji characters into a table in MySQL, but values are stored as question marks (????).
I made sure to create the database with the proper utf8mb4 encoding:
mysql> describe users;
+-------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id | int(11) | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| name | varchar(191) | YES | | NULL | |
+-------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)
Then I tried to make sure, does MySql understand emoji or not, so I did this:
mysql> select '🌰';
+------+
| 🌰 |
+------+
| 🌰 |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Then I did this:
mysql> insert into users (name) values ('🌰');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.05 sec)
mysql> select * from users;
+----+------------+
| id | name |
+----+------------+
| 21 | فاضل |
| 30 | سلاحف |
| 46 | ???? |
| 47 | ???? |
| 48 | ???? |
| 49 | ???? |
+----+------------+
6 rows in set (0.01 sec)
I don't know what to do to fix that..
** EDIT ** : as requested in the comments, I ran the following command:
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character%';
+--------------------------+-------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+-------------------------+
| character_set_client | utf8 |
| character_set_connection | utf8 |
| character_set_database | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8 |
| character_set_server | utf8 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| character_sets_dir | /static/share/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+-------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Answer 1

Your connection is set up for utf8; it needs to be set up for utf8mb4.
How did you set it? Change to whichever of these applies.
SET NAMES utf8mb4
PDO(... charset=utf8mb4)
mysqli::set_charset('utf8mb4')
etc
Emoji are 4-byte utf8 codes, hence the four question marks.