“In these three seemingly innocuous emoji “🇯🇵 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 👍🏽” are actually 9 different glyphs.” Um, no, should be 3 emoji sequences and hence glyphs (but could be more) for 11 code points. The number of characters is debatable, but I’d say 6 or 7 (1 flag + 4 people + 1 emoji with skin tone), because I would not count ZWJ, VS and Emoji Modifiers, and RISs must be paired.

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/proposed.html#def_emoji_sequence http://www.unicode.org/faq/char_combmark.html#7