How can I disable the unicode black telephone from being rendered as a red phone on iOS Mail app?

Question

I am using the unicode black telephone character (☎ U+260E) in html email. On the iOS Mail app (tested on iPhone and iPad) the black telephone character is rendered as a illustrated as a red emoji phone icon.

Note that the unicode white telephone character (☏ U+260F) is not displayed as emoji.

I've tried to force the font to "Helvetica" …but no luck.

Is there any way to force iOS Mail to use the flat black telephone unicode character?

Answer 1

I cannot test this in iOS Mail, and I doubt whether it will work there, but this is the way that a specific glyph variant could be selected. According to the Unicode Standard, you can select a standardized variant “BLACK TELEPHONE text style” (as opposite to “BLACK TELEPHONE emoji style”) by immediately following U+260E by the control character U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15.

In HTML, the character sequence U+260E U+FE0E can be written as ☎︎.

But I’m afraid software support to variation selectors is still very limited. For example, web browsers seem to fail with it in different ways.

Answer 2

A little more than a year late, but specify the font like so to fix this:

<span style="font-family:dingbats, arial unicode ms, code2000, sans-serif;">&#x260e;</span>