Got it! But not sure about solution...
I checked how the text renders in gmail and it looks fine. So I went to the specific field in the db and saw that the characters are incorrect in the db already:
amazingly… Patrick Liew form Lancôme arranged that we spend a day at The Lancôme Institute, and if that was not enough, ended with getting our hair treated at the L’Oreal Hair Spa!</p> <p>
I then remembered the same issue I had about 6 months ago with the database encoding on another website. An experienced web developer helped me to correct things, but I cannot remember where to change the code. He gave me this line to replace in that instance:
Replace sql_set_charset:
mysql_query("SET DBFIELD 'utf8'", $mydbname) or die(mysql_error());
I know the problem is caused by the db encoding. How can I correct this?