Cannot retrieve some emoticons from database

The reply from the server is a SOAP envelope (i.e. XML), and it doesn't make sense to declare an Accept header on the request, or respond with Content-Type header with any other Content-Type besides "application/xml".

It looks like your endpoint is correctly encoding the unicode characters (w3.org), which is what you see in the raw response view. SoapUI may not display those characters unescaped in the XML view, but your application (endpoint consumer) might still handle them correctly.

You could try inserting your endpoint's response into the following javascript code, which you can run in your browser's web console to verify that the unicode characters display correctly:

(function (){
    const response = `<emojis>&#9786;</emojis>`;
    return new DOMParser()
        .parseFromString(response, 'text/xml')
        .getElementsByTagName("emojis")[0]
        .firstChild
        .data;
})();