How to Change the Default Skin Tone in Slack
Before Apple introduced their racial emoji back in 2015, people of color were used to using the universal skin tone from The Simpsons in our digital communications. Since then, it has become fairly standard practice to include multiple skin tone options for the desktop version of many of the sites we use, including the most popular work messaging app, Slack.
How to change the default skin tone in Slack
On your laptop, you can set your preferred skin tone as the default in Slack to make everyday use easier and faster. Just click on the emoji menu and look in the lower right corner. You should see the hand, by default it will be Simpson’s yellow. Click that hand and choose which of the six skin tones best suits your own. This global change will apply to all variable skin tone emoji in the future.
Since the choice of skin for emoji is controlled by the operating system on your phone, you won’t see the same option in Slack for Android or iOS. As an iPhone user, I have to choose a skin tone for each emoji, one by one, manually changing each one as I use them.
The desktop versions of other popular services such as Twitter and Facebook Messenger also have the option to change the skin tone of the emoji. On Twitter, you can choose a default skin tone by clicking the emoji menu and choosing a skin tone option in the lower right corner, similar to Slack; while on Facebook Messenger, you have to click on your Facebook Messenger profile in the upper left corner, scroll down to the Settings section and click on Emoji, which will give you six skin tone options to choose from.
Once you change your preference, the times of the “standard” plastic yellow thumb emoji will disappear. Set the default skin tone to match your real one, and feel free to take a quick look at the settings of other services you use if you’re interested in changing the default skin tone for your digital communications. It won’t work for the emoji themselves, which retain their cartoonish yellow color, but your thumbs up emoji, clasped hands, fist emoji, etc. will represent you a little better.