Mysql illegal mix of collations when all collations already standardized

Question

I'm getting a strange mysql error: when trying to insert a row into a table that includes the Look Of Disapproval - ಠ_ಠ - I get the following error:

Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation = 'select...

Sure enough, some of the tables in my database were set to the latin1_swedish_ci collation. I changed all of the tables to utf8_general_ci, but the error persists.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

Collation can also be set at the individual column level.

See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-collations.html
And: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/create-table.html

Made it community wiki, so you can accept it without me getting @Dan's rep.