Call me persnickety, but I didn't let this issue ride peacefully into the sunset...

As I don't think I had ever used CSS entities after 4 years of studying and using the language, I figured there must be a more popular solution.

There is.

Declare the character encoding in CSS files. In other words, make the first line of your external stylesheet read: @charset "UTF-8";. We've all seen this before.

You should be good to go with HTML entities in the content property going forward.

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-css-charset.en.php

I'm think I'm ready to move on now ;-)