Set value of character_set_client to utf8mb4
Disclosure: I’m the author of How to support full Unicode in MySQL databases, the guide you’re following.


Where did you save the modified settings? Check where mysqld loads the default options from. It’s usually /etc/my.cnf (as mentioned in the guide) but it may be different on your system. Run the following command to find out:

$ mysqld --help --verbose 2&gt; /dev/null | grep -A1 'Default options'
Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /usr/local/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

Did you restart mysqld by running mysqld restart after making the changes?