What is the '😋' character?

According to this page it is the "Unicode Character 'FACE SAVOURING DELICIOUS FOOD' (U+1F60B)":

in general, searching for smileys and strange characters like this is better on http://duckduckgo.com which is a great search engine anyway.

UPDATE

I did some more testing following the discussion in the comments. I don't think the rendering differences depend on the font. The following is a screenshot showing the character written in different fonts in Libre Office (Linux)

This is the character as displayed on my linux box by firefox (Chromium and Opera show the same):

On my iPad, it is first displayed as a smaller (placeholder?) glyph as shown below but then resolves itself to the same image as those above:

So, I don't know how these Unicode glyphs are encoded, but they don't seem to be font dependent. I don't imagine most fonts include a specific rendering of emoticons, so there must be a shared way of displaying them that is platform/system dependent and not tied to a specific font.

As seen in Segoe UI Symbol, 72 pt

(Image from Mac OS X Character Viewer. I take no credit for the info in the image.)

On Mac OS X, I think Lion and above. Testing in TextEdit reveals that it is unaffected by font, as the Character Viewer appears to state in the font variation section of its entry.

Speculating on why your colleague used it, it's relatively simple to insert on Mac, using the Character Viewer/Special Characters under the emoji section (funny enough, this one's not in Messages' list of smileys). It's also easy to insert on iPad, using the Emoji "international" keyboard. There are definitely other ways to do it, and on other platforms, those are just the ways I've found to type them that aren't too hard to find. Who can't resist typing fancy colored emoticons that they found looking through random features of their system?

It might be something interesting to ask your colleague about.

This is what inspired me to make this post. Just noticed it randomly. It isn't rendered in the web page, just the tab title and the tab's hovertext. (this is on Mac 10.8 with Chrome 23)