Prevent Select2 from sanitizing markup in backend?

Is there any way of preventing Select2 from sanitizing markup? It's converting my arrow brackets (< >) to &lt; and &gt;, breaking how it would otherwise display. I would prefer not to have to generate hundreds of images of solid colors and instead let CSS handle it.

Current Result:

Desired Result:

(ignoring broken CSS as I haven't gotten that far to fix it; works fine when the menu is opened)

Hello

we have a colorpicker field that needs to be patched to support mult-value

i can patch it  / finish its code and add it to our main distribution package
but it will not have a specific list of values

in your case you need a multi-value select ?

Hello

i see the Joomla --form element-- color
also support a predefined list of colors, just it does not add a name for them

but we can use our own custom layout and add color names too

so we can also have option for predefined list of colors

Correct; I need a multi-value select. I'm hopeful to have names with colors as some users want to be able to search colors by their name. Where auto-complete doesn't work, I can always have it sorted alphabetically.

Hello

Also if you disable the usage of 'select2' JS inside field configuration

then you will see that the conversion to HTML special character classes is made by the field code itself
it is not made by the JS gallery

The conversion is done because:
No, you can't have HTML tags inside the OPTION tags of the SELECT Now if using select2 ,
then it is possible to use its initialization to add such HTML for the purpose of displaying, but we will be replacing select2.js with choices.js so i am reluctant to add something that later may not be supported

I'll wait to see what results choices.js yields and come back.