Extended latin characters missing on save() - Laravel 5.8

Long story short - whenever I'm trying to save string containing extended Latin characters (in my case Latvian), for example:

Lorem Ipsum ir kļuvis par vispārpieņemtu teksta aizvietotāju kopš 16. gadsimta sākuma.

on save() it saves the string in database without special characters, like so:

Lorem Ipsum ir kuvis par visprpieemtu teksta aizvietotju kop 16. gadsimta skuma.

I double checked my database default charset and it is utf8mb4 with utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation. The file containing the controller that saves to database is UTF-8. Also I double checked string before saving it to database - it returns full Latvian string.

Before trying PHP Normalizer class, I would like to ask for some insight from you guys. what am I doing wrong? What could be causing this?

Also I have a feeling that on other non-Latin charsets (extended Cyrillic for example) it will fail to save the extended characters too (haven't it tested tho').

Thank you in advance for help!

via Chebli Mohamed