Unicode emojis aren’t ascii .

Long before Unicode points were assigned we were using emojis in text communication in email and sms.

you can always be quite expressive with ones like :) :D :-( or even ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - although not strictly ASCII.

Those are called emoticons, not emoji. "Emoji" came about specifically to distinguish the single-character ones (unicode or proprietary) from what we did before.