Install High Sierra Emoji on Older Versions

I'm being extremely stubborn and refusing to update to High Sierra at the moment for good reason. The only thing that's really been annoying me is the fact I can't see emoji sent from iOS 11 or macOS 10.13 on Sierra but there's an easy fix.

Emoji is just a font that renders the unicode characters. On a Mac this is called Apple Color Emoji.ttc and is located in /System/Library/Fonts. Because of this it's very easily overriden by placing a newer version in /Library/Fonts.

Note the directory to place the new font in is /Library/Fonts not /System/Library/Fonts. Do not edit the System directory.

I got my friend Tim who had already upgraded to High Sierra on an external drive for testing to send over the new Emoji font and placed it in /Library/Fonts. Automatically, macOS started rendering the new Emoji.

If you want to install the new emoji I've uploaded the new font here.

The new font version is 13.1d3e1.

The new emoji won't appear in the panel but they will be rendered and if there's one you particularly like you could always make an autocompletion shortcut.