Chrome does not render emoji in color when using sans-serif font-face

rendering example showing emoji rendering as plain unicode in sans-serif font

There could be a workaround…

UTF has special characters to control the rendering. U+FE0E asks OS and browser to render the previous glyph as text, U+FE0F asks to render the previous glyph as emoji.

— Nikita Dubko in Prevent text glyphs from turning into emojis

… but another bug in Chrome prevent is from working

964527 - Chrome often ignores emoji and text variation selectors U+FE0F and U+FE0E - chromium

See also lots details about rendering emoji by Nikita Prokopov in Emoji under the hood @ tonsky.me.