"Incorrect string value" when trying to insert UTF-8 into MySQL via JDBC?

This is how my connection is set: `Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url + dbName + "?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8", userName, password);` And I'm getting the following error when tyring to add a row to a table: `Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x90\x8D\x83\xF0\x90...' for column 'content' at row 1` I'm inserting thousands of records, and I always get this error when the text contains \xF0 (i.e. the the incorrect string value always starts with \xF0). The column's collation is utf8_general_ci. What could be the problem?