Skin Tones on emoji

This may help. I have emoji keyboard enabled in my Mac menu bar and am able to hold down on the trackpad and select skin tone

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-emoji-and-symbols-on-mac-mchlp1560/mac

sunwant wrote:

Every thread says to click and hold on emoji to pull up skin tone options. That does not work on my MacBook Air. Please help.

Use emoji and symbols on Mac - Apple Support

i don't know if this is related to what you're seeing. but for some reason, on my machine, the click and hold to show skin tone only works with the emojis starting with the "two open pals" emoji. it does not work for the "face" emojis before that.

again, for me, it does work starting with that one.

and this emoji appears to be the LAST one that i can choose skin tone.

if this is the same for you, you may want to let apple know.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Go to the emoji keyboard in the menu and click show emoji & symbols

You should get a floating selector

Choose a "person" emoji and click it

Upon click, you should see the skin tone selector