html - Font Awesome icon in select option

Question

I try to add a caret down icon to the first selection of several options as shown on the picture below:

here is a Fiddle with my example.

I can't get the icon to be visible on the Fiddle above.

And the corresponding code:

.wrapper {
  height: 200px;
  background-color: red;
  padding-top: 100px;
  padding-left: 150px;
}
#before-select {
  font-size: 30px;
  color: #ffffff;
}
select {
  border: none;
  background: transparent;
  /*background-color: blue;*/
  -webkit-appearance: none;
  -moz-appearance: none;
  appearance: none;
  width: 180px;
  padding-top: 0px;
  background-size: 20px;
  color: #ffffff;
  font-size: 30px;
}
select option {
  color: #424146;
  background: #ffffff;
}

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://bootswatch.com/bower_components/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.5.0/css/font-awesome.min.css" />

<div class="wrapper">

  <form role="form">
    <span id="before-select">in</span>

    <select name="town">
      <option value="London">London <i class="fa fa-caret-down" aria-hidden="true"></i>
      </option>
      <option value="Paris">Paris</option>
      <option value="Madrid">Madrid</option>
    </select>


  </form>


</div>

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.12.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>

Answer 1

You can simply add a FontAwesome icon to your select dropdown as text. You only need a few things in CSS only, the FontAwesome CSS and the unicode. For example :

select {
  font-family: 'FontAwesome', 'Second Font name'
}

<link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.6.1/css/font-awesome.min.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<select>
  <option>Hi, &#xf042;</option>
  <option>Hi, &#xf043;</option>
  <option>Hi, &#xf044;</option>
  <option>Hi, &#xf045;</option>
  <option>Hi, &#xf046;</option>
</select>