Can't set up Unicode support
&lt;meta charset="UTF-8"&gt; -- correct for outside MySQL

utf8mb4 is the term you need to use inside MySQL, including 

mysqli_set_charset($myConnection, "utf8mb4");


Ã£ is Mojibake for ã.  This happens when latin1 is mistakenly somewhere in the data flow.

Hex EA E7 E3 is the the latin1 encoding for êçã.
Hex C3AA C3A7 C3A3 is the UTF-8 (utf8mb4) encoding for them.

Since you have presented different symptoms, let me present to you 'Best Practice' and how to diagnose the symptoms for 'black diamond with question mark', 'Mojibake', etc.  Note that there are 4-5 places where you have to consistently use UTF-8.