update of UTF8 text column gives error

I've never experienced a problem with an exotic character saving to Mariadb before, but this trips up the JDBC driver prepared statement:

actually when i paste in the example, it shows correctly here but jira prevents me from saving it; it might be a strange 4 byte character possibly as follows (commonly used in email being copied and pasted into a text field as html):

😊

The smiley face encoded as a UTF8 string causes the following error:

(conn=78522) Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x8A</...' for column 'comments' at row 1) #1366 (TransactionSet.java:1050)

java.sql.SQLDataException: (conn=78522) Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x8A</...' for column 'comments' at row 1