[Hokieman]

ZW, actually you are using sim surgery, but just going at it a different way that I find more direct and easier. Changing a skintone, means changing the SimDNA and you will end up at the screens I talked about anyway. When I open the sim surgery window, the only skintones I see are the defaults. I don't see the cc skintones. And to be honest, I was never very successful doing it that way.

On your Liquorice skintone, I have a few of those that did that too, though, it's mostly for the non-default bodyshapes. Take a look at the file size on your Liquorice and compare it to your other skins. The ones that CL Tool doesn't want to read tend to be quite a bit larger than most of the others. I suspect that something went wrong somewhere along the way when the skin was made. What I did to get them to be read was to use Bodyshop to strip the textures and then create a new skintone.

On default skintones, like Rose said, but you may have to experiment a bit because it's really easy to get more than one type (S1, S2, etc.) in your downloads since some creators don't label them the same as others and some may be deliberately changed (ie, a skin labeled as tan could be an S2 or S3). The game only uses the last one that it reads on load so if you have, for example, two S1s, and the one you want to use is the first one read, then you'll never see it in game. Also, there are actually 9 default skintones. In addition to Light, Tan, Medium and Dark, there are plantsim, vampire, werewolf, zombie and alien. Some like the vampire, act like clothes, like an overlay, so the original skintones' non-barbie bits will still be there, but others don't, they are full replacements.