Emoji not showing properly on the category description area

I’ve added a category on my forum, a parent category, and on the description is ended with an emoji, a smiley face to be specific, but when user selects all category, the text description shows the emoji as [smile] rather than :smile:

when the category is accessed, the smiley face is shown properly.

This is correct and as designed. You will see the same behavior on your user page in the post excerpts…

This still looks odd, see the sample from the stock Lounge post’s Confetti ball:

It’s interesting that the : : are replaced with [ ] rather than having the emoji through

I just ran into this again on our hosted forum, and thought it looked odd.

Is there a way to have emoji look muted, but still have the right shape?