Once you find a Unicode code point you can put it into a Perl string in several ways:

my $thumbs_up = "";

$thumbs_up = "\x{1F44D}";
$thumbs_up = "\N{U+1F44D}";
$thumbs_up = chr(0x1F44D);
$thumbs_up = pack("U", 0x1F44D);

# Make sure STDOUT is set to accept UTF8
binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");

print $thumbs_up x 2 . "\n";