I'm excited about the proposal to add a brontosaurus emoji codepoint

[Christoph Päper]

Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko at namakajiri.net>:
> 
> All of the current face expression emoji are to be decomposed as FACE plus abstract combining characters; for example, U+1F642 SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE will be considered a compatibility variant of FACE + COMBINING SMILE + COMBINING SLIGHT FACIAL EXPRESSION

This is actually not as absurd as you may want it to sound. There would probably have been less glyph ambiguity if the emoticons part of emoji had been encoded as character sequences (combining or not) using the building blocks of existing emoticons (sideways Western and upright Eastern style) as a base, e.g. Winking Eye ⟨;⟩ ����, Smiling Eyes ⟨^^⟩ ��������, Laughing Mouth ⟨D⟩ ��������, Open Mouth ⟨o⟩/⟨O⟩/⟨0⟩ ��, Halo ⟨o⟩/⟨O⟩/⟨0⟩ ����, Clown Nose ⟨o⟩, Drop ⟨'⟩ ��/�� (sweat ������, tear ������, snot, drool). Your example �� has the default face, i.e. :-) or =) or (°_°) or U+263A, with a special mouth, so it would rather be either Face + Combining Slight Smile or Face + ZWJ + Slight Smile. U+263B would still be available as a neutral base, but you could actually try to combine U+1F636 with existing combining diacritics: ��̴.