Is there a way to see the invisible formatting in my clipboard and/or create the formatting when piping to pbcopy?
An thing on the clipboard is actually an OO-style object which has methods to render itself appropriately in each context.  So the reason that your hex dump from PBCOPY is the same even when the object on the clipboard is different is because the text-only renderings are both the same.

Just as a file on the clip board will render as its ascii file path in contexts that only accept text pastes.  I believe that pbcopy and pbpaste only operate with this textual format for the objects on the clipboard, so you cannot use them to do what you are aiming to do.

If I understand your objective correctly, you could hack it, by using an application like textedit, and feed the application as an rtf (rich text formatted file) then send a COMMAND-A, then COMMAND-C to the text edit application  (or perhaps a text-edit specific dictionary commands).

This is really hacky, and it would result in visible action on your screen, but it would be a scripted way to get ascii encoded markup onto the clipboard.

Post a follow up, if you want help implementing this.