DBD::MySQL 

• MySQL UTF8 support is weird
• utf8mb3 – only supports up to 3 byte characters
• utf8mb4 – supports up to 4 byte characters

my $attr = {
    RaiseError           => 1,
    mysql_enable_utf8mb4 => 1,
};
$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:mysql:database=$dbname", $user, $pswd, $attr);