Yes, sending SMSes containing real Emoji characters (as used by harmoji 0.7.3) works for me too!
An important improvement of harmoji 0.7.3 compared to 0.6.6 is that 0.7.3 uses different unicode characters which will be displayed correctly on Android phones (and probably everywhere!). Thanks to Iryus tests, packaging my libsms-utils (or a patcher) probably makes sense now!

There is one remaining problem though: as soon as you insert an Emoji character into your SMS, the SMS count and remaining characters count will become zero. But I successfully sent an SMS with Emoji and it was received at the other side. However, I've not tried sending a multi-part SMS with Emoji.

My "guess" is that libsms-utils was also trying to send SMSes using UCS-2, and my hack has fixed both sending & receiving.

What about color Emoji? Well, I think "at least" it requires Freetype 2.5 according to its release announcement. So, updating freetype is probably the first step towards that.