Slack Skin Tone and Default Emoji: Where to Change Them

To set your default skin tone in Slack, open the emoji picker from the smiley in the message box, click Skin Tone at the bottom right, and pick one of the six hands, or go to Preferences, Messages & media, Default Skin Tone. Every emoji that has skin tones changes to that tone at once. The setting is yours only; other people keep their own default. To change Slack's default emoji, the three that show when you hover a message, turn on Show one-click reactions on messages on the same Preferences page and pick them under Custom.

We tested it on 29 September 2026 in Slack in the browser, in a one-person test workspace. We also checked what Slack saves in each message, because the default does not apply everywhere.

Set your default skin tone

• Click the smiley (Emoji) in the message box.
• Click Skin Tone, the hand at the bottom right of the picker.
• Pick a hand in "Choose your default skin tone": no tone (yellow), light, medium-light, medium, medium-dark or dark.

The Skin Tone button then shows your tone instead of the words. Slack saves the choice in your account, as the preference preferred_skin_tone. It was empty before we changed it and "4" after we picked medium. To go back to yellow, open the same menu and pick the first hand.

Change Slack's default emoji (one-click reactions)

The emoji Slack offers when you hover over a message are set on the same Preferences page as the skin tone. We opened it in Slack in the browser on 6 October 2026:

• Click your profile picture, then Preferences.
• Open Messages & media and scroll to Emoji.
• Tick Show one-click reactions on messages.
• Choose My most frequently used emoji, or Custom and click each of the three boxes to pick an emoji.

The example message under the setting shows the hover bar with your three emoji in front of Find another reaction. The box was off in our test account when we opened the page; with it off, hovering a message shows only the add-reaction button. The setting is per person, so it does not change what anyone else sees. A tone you pick in Default Skin Tone here is the same setting as the Skin Tone button in the picker.

Where the default applies, and where it does not

We sent one message with a thumbs up added three ways, then read back what Slack stored:

So if you type emoji codes from memory and close the colon yourself, you get the yellow version. Let autocomplete finish the code, or add the tone by hand. The message stores the tone, so everyone sees the tone you picked, whatever their own default is. Through the API, reactions.add takes the same name without colons, such as wave::skin-tone-3; our reactions.add test has the other name rules.

This autocomplete menu shows the toned thumbs up first:

Skin tone codes

A tone is a second code right after the emoji: :wave::skin-tone-3:. Codes run from skin-tone-2 (light) to skin-tone-6 (dark). There is no skin-tone-1; plain :wave: is the yellow one. The full list of emoji codes is in Slack emoji codes.

We added reactions to one message with reactions.add, using every tone, one past each end, and an emoji with no tones:

invalid_name also comes back for a tone on an emoji that has no tones, such as fire. Slack saved thumbsup as +1, its main name, and showed all six thumbs up reactions as one group with a count of 6, as in the screenshot above. More on reactions from code is in how to react to a message in Slack.

Custom emoji have no skin tones

Tones only exist for the standard emoji that Unicode gives tones. A custom emoji is a single image, so if you want your own hands in several tones, upload one image per tone, such as :clap-medium:. The Slack emoji maker makes the images at Slack's size.