Answer : Yes, you can color them! div { color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 0 red; } <div></div> Not every emoji works the same. Some are old textual symbols that now have an (optional or default) colorful representation, others were explicitly (only) as emojis. That means, some Unicode codepoints should have two possible representations, text and emoji . Authors and users should be able to express their preference for one or the other. This is currently done with otherwise invisible variation selectors U+FE0E ( text , VS-15) and U+FE0F ( emoji , VS-16), but higher-level solutions (e.g. for CSS) have been proposed. The text-style emojis are monochromatic and should be displayed in the foreground color, i.e. currentcolor in CSS, just like any other glyph. The Unicode Consortium provides an overview of emojis by style (beta version). You should be able to append ︎ in HTML to select the textual variant with anything in the columns labeled “De...