Otherwise I think these are oddly a good idea. I used to make frequent use of unicodesnowmanforyou.com to get my ️snowman emojis (I'd add one but hn does not permit). Would hardly be able to justify the domain registration expense though.
These related words also exist:
スマイリー (sumairii/smiley: could be kaomoji or emoji, I think)
エモーティコン (emoochikon/emoticon)
フェイスマーク (feisumaaku/"face mark").
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"). The resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.
Emoji specifically refers to these 'pictures' that were definitely transmitted via Unicode, originating in the 90s from Japan.
> For NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, each emoji is drawn on a 12×12 pixel grid. When transmitted, emoji symbols are specified as a two-byte sequence, in the private-use range E63E through E757 in the Unicode character space, or F89F through F9FC for Shift JIS.
As you pointed out, this predates the Unicode standard that we have now, but there is still a very distinct difference between emoticons (which this is) and emojis (which this definitely isn't)
Emoticon — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon
Interesting. So more accurately, this is a kaomoji.