[account42]

> Unfortunately they undermined all that with Han Unification, with the result that it's never going to be adopted in Japan.

This is an absolute shame and there is no excuse for fixing it so that variations for unified characters can be encoded before adding unimportant things like skin tones.

[wodenokoto]

> So rather than treat the issue as a rich text problem of glyph alternates, Unicode added the concept of variation selectors, first introduced in version 3.2 and supplemented in version 4.0.[10] While variation selectors are treated as combining characters, they have no associated diacritic or mark. Instead, by combining with a base character, they signal the two character sequence selects a variation (typically in terms of grapheme, but also in terms of underlying meaning as in the case of a location name or other proper noun) of the base character. This then is not a selection of an alternate glyph, but the selection of a grapheme variation or a variation of the base abstract character. Such a two-character sequence however can be easily mapped to a separate single glyph in modern fonts. Since Unicode has assigned 256 separate variation selectors, it is capable of assigning 256 variations for any Han ideograph. Such variations can be specific to one language or another and enable the encoding of plain text that includes such grapheme variations. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

This is what you’re asking for, right? Control characters that designates which version of a unified character is to be displayed.

Sure looks like it exists.