Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: SPARKLES

✨ SPARKLES, aka Unicode code point 0x2728 . If you spend even a modest proportion of your time online, you have almost certainly come across the SPARKLES emoji (✨). It’s a cheery and versatile symbol, and it is increasing found outside emoji’s usual habitat of text messages and social networks. Of late, in fact, SPARKLES has taken on a new gig that promises to significantly boost its profile, if…