I'm using Eloquent to save() a new person into my database. The persons name contains a special character é and it's not submitting. Here are my steps and the results.

echo Input::get('firstname'); // Miguél

Which gives me this

Miguél

When i start using eloquent the following happens.

$person = new Person(); echo $person->firstname = Input::get('firstname');

This produces the following result

migu��l

Any idea what might be going wrong? These are my config settings in laravel

And this is my database in phpmyadmin

Thanks