Process of transforming existing glyphs to emojis via variants

[Adib Behjat]

Hello and Happy Friday!

I have a question with regards to transformation of existing glyphs into emojis. At the moment, there's no documentation present with regards to this process, and the only available example is Michel Suignard proposal for including Webdings and Wingdings into emoji set: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11344-wingdings.pdf. 

I was reviewing the Sikh Khanda proposal and its implementation, and I noticed that a new code point was given for it in the emoji list on the https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html (U+1FAAF). This code point was created despite the fact the glyph already existed in Unicode 1.1 with code point U+262C. 

Wouldn't it have been more efficient to utilize a variant instead of a new code point for the Sikh Khanda? I reviewed the "The Unicode Standard" Variation Selectors Chapter, and I believe it satisfies the conditions for the original glyph U+262C to have been appended with a variant given the proposal (it’s a glyph that won’t be used along side other base glyphs or texts to impact the representation of the character along with other characters).

To circle back, for existing scripts/glyphs that are in Unicode blocks but not in Emoji format, is there a documentation on utilizing variants to transform a said glyph to emoji depending on platform?