Laravel 5.1 utf-8 saving to database

1. config you database file to utf8_unicode_ci

Check the file config/database.php :

'charset'   => 'utf8',
'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',

2. Make sure your Mysql databases is set to utf8 and MySQL’s utf8mb4 is better

3. Make sure your file character set to UTF-8 without BOM

I personally think you problem in you IDE, try to use Atom.