Emoji icons are appearing as black squares & missing from Character Palate

From today my emoji icons in messages appear as black squares (some with a face inside but most without) and when I click on them nothing appears in my text field. In my character viewer in the finder I have an entry for emoji but nothing within the sub menu's. Coincidentally at exactly the same time my twitter feed looked all messed up with lots of black squares on every tweet. I figured this was a case of a missing font or one that needs to be activated but cannot locate an emoji font anywhere on my system. Any suggestions people?

Running latest Mavericks on Macbook Pro. Using FontExplorer Pro for font management.