Bear Kaomoji
Thirty bear faces, ready to copy. Two of them are ears, one is a muzzle, and everything else can be swapped — the Japanese tradition builds the same animal from completely different parts.
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The ears are two IPA letters
The bear’s outline is ʕ and ʔ, and neither is a bracket. ʕ is U+0295 LATIN LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE and ʔ is U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP — two consonant letters from the IPA Extensions block that happen to curve like a rounded ear. Because Unicode files them as letters rather than punctuation, an editor that closes brackets automatically has nothing to act on here: ʕ is not an opening bracket, so no partner is inserted after it. A face framed in real parentheses, such as (´･ω･`), does give such an editor something to match, and that is where a stray extra bracket comes from.
The muzzle is ᴥ, U+1D25 LATIN LETTER AIN, from Phonetic Extensions. The same muzzle turns up on dog faces as (•ᴥ•), which the Japanese 犬の顔文字 page covers in full; a bear is that muzzle with two ears added.
Everything else is swappable
Only three characters make it a bear. The eyes are free. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ with bullets is the neutral form. ʕ˙ᴥ˙ʔ uses U+02D9 DOT ABOVE, which sits higher and reads as more awake. ʕ ᵕᴥᵕ ʔ uses U+1D55 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL BOTTOM HALF O, a shallow cup that reads as closed. ʕ≧ᴥ≦ʔ screws them shut with a pair of mathematical relations, U+2267 and U+2266.
There is a width trap here. ʕ, ʔ and ᴥ are all East Asian Neutral, so nothing in the width property asks for a full character cell. • U+2022 BULLET is East Asian Ambiguous, which means the character does not fix its own width: in an East Asian typographic context it takes a full cell, and outside one it takes a narrow cell. The same bear is therefore tight in one place and loose in another, and nothing about the paste has changed.
The Japanese bear is built differently
Japanese kaomoji draw a bear with none of those letters, bracketing a snout inside the face instead: ( ´(ｴ)｀ ). The snout is ｴ U+FF74 HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER E, or its small form ｪ U+FF6A. Half-width is the entire point — a full-width エ would swallow the face it sits in. When arms appear they are ⊂ and ⊃, U+2282 SUBSET OF and U+2283 SUPERSET OF, taken purely for their shape.
Where a bear breaks
The ears and the muzzle come from different blocks, so they do not stand or fall together: ʕ and ʔ are IPA Extensions, ᴥ is Phonetic Extensions. Where the text font carries one and not the other, the missing character is drawn from a fallback font at that font’s own height, and the muzzle drifts away from the ears. The round-eared variants ᐡ•ᴥ•ᐡ and ᐢ•ᴥ•ᐢ use U+1421 and U+1422 from Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics — if those arrive as empty boxes, the font in front of you has no glyph for them, and re-copying will not add one. The same two rings are used for ears on bunny kaomoji, so if they fail here they will fail there too.
Adding a gesture
A bear acts by growing limbs on the outside while the face holds still. っ U+3063 HIRAGANA LETTER SMALL TU is a curled paw, so ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ reaches; ﾉ U+FF89 is an arm thrown up; ♡ U+2661 WHITE HEART SUIT after it turns the gesture into a gift. The face itself does not move, which is most of the charm.
The rest of the character inventory behind these faces is on the kaomoji hub. A bear takes a blush without any other change, and the flanking marks that do it are set out on blushing kaomoji; asleep, they follow the rules on sleepy kaomoji.