Laravel 5.3 not inserting URL to database

So I am extending the AuthController to contain a few more fields, which are all working great apart from a link to the users avatar (it is an URL of around 150 chars long). Code looks like:

    return User::create([
        'first_name' => ucfirst($first_name),
        'last_name' => ucwords($last_name),
        'email' => $data['email'],
        'password' => bcrypt($data['password']),
        'dob' => date("Y-m-d", strtotime($dob)),
        'avatar' => $data['avatar'],
        'gender' => $data['gender'],
    ]);

The URL is being sent using a hidden field and I can confirm it is being sent by looking at POST data on firefox.

When I am looking at the MySQL log, I can see the insert for the rest of the fields, but for some reason, it is skipping or missing out the avatar field altogether. MySQL log shows:

Prepare insert into `users` 
(`name`, `email`, `password`, `dob`, `gender`, `updated_at`, `created_at`) 
values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)

it should be:

Prepare insert into `users` 
(`name`, `email`, `password`, `dob`, `gender`, `avatar`, `updated_at`, `created_at`) 
values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)

I have also added validation rule:
'avatar' => 'sometimes|url|max:255,

Although I do not think validation is the issue as it does not work even if this is commented out..

I don't think I need to do mysqli_real_escape_string as it is PDO? Also it's not a cache issue as I have changed and tested other fields and they work fine.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Thanks

via Chebli Mohamed