FTFY
Nah.
emoji
ɪˈməʊdʒi
noun
plural noun: emojis
a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication.
"emoji liven up your text messages with tiny smiley faces"
emoticon
ɪˈməʊtɪkɒn,-ˈmɒtɪ-
noun
plural noun: emoticons
a representation of a facial expression such as a smile or frown, formed by various combinations of keyboard characters and used in electronic communications to convey the writer's feelings or intended tone.
"flag your jokes with emoticons, such as a smiley face :-), to avoid misunderstandings"
As there is a snowflake in our repertoire, "emoji" is fitting. However, both can be used interchangeably. Yay, English is fun!
You insinuating that snowflake isn't an emotion? 
My issue with calling these emoji is that on a technical level, the two are very different. Emoji are character sets of pictographs, originating as Japanese cell phone character sets and now present in Unicode. Emoticons are pictorial representations created by existing characters (letters, punctuation marks, etc.), which in many forums are then converted into pictographs.
So while you may be right from a linguistic perspective (especially since conflating the two is becoming increasingly common), that doesn't necessarily hold true from a technological point of view.
Um. That's what I was meaning. At least, I think I was meaning that?
This is an emoticon: =D or (ಠ ∩ಠ)
This is an emoji: 
or 
Although, the latter emoticon is apparently better classed as kaomoji.
And my response:
This is an emoticon: :]
This is a kaomoji (a type of emoticon): ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
This is an emoji (using Unicode): 😀 or ❄️
This is typed as an emoticon and rendered as a pictograph (and therefore generally called an emoticon):
One has been converted into a different image, the other retains keystrokes. Since the end result of (most) emoticons used in Wintreath are converted into pictographs, emoji better reflects it.
As I've said earlier, while this may seem to fit for a basic dictionary definition,
"emoji" as a technical term refers to pictographs referenced by a
character set. (Basically. each character [letter, numeral, emoji, etc.] is represented by a number. The American standard used to be
ASCII, which worked fine for the English alphabet, but nowadays we usually use
Unicode, which tries to represent every language in existence, including emoji. Good video on the topic, focusing on emoji,
here.)
In addition, a snowflake is not an emoticon. As stated in your source:
Emoticons (from “emotion” plus “icon”) are specifically intended to depict facial expression or body posture as a way of conveying emotion or attitude in e-mail and text messages.
Yeah, that was a joke. Hence the "
".
More seriously, though, the snowflake is a pictograph implemented using the "Emoticons" feature of this particular forum.
I'd also like to add that to me at least, emoji sounds less formal than emoticon does, and thus better fit the tone I was aiming at in the initial post. However, I could be reading my sources wrong and am misusing my terminology so... oops?
(I'm gunning for a BA in English, sorry. =D I like these types of debates).
Nope, emoji and emoticon are equally formal/informal terminologies (with, as I have argued, different meanings). In fact, the two are completely unrelated etymologically (or, to use a linguistics term, they're
false cognates). "Emoticon" is a portmanteau of emotion and icon. On the other hand, "emoji" is a Japanese loanword originally meaning "pictograph", from e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character").
