Stoneskin Variants, How to be golden

Edit: All screenshots are using medium texture and low shader settings, I may change that....

The stoneskin infusion completely covers your character (clothing, skin, hair, but not the eyes) in a mottled grey color. The grey will have different values of light and dark depending on what the material is. https://i.imgur.com/zhxQSrEm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/yCMnEzym.jpg https://i.imgur.com/QRb8l90m.jpg 

Note: The blue "skin" of the Zodiac armor skins will not be affected by the stoneskin infusion at all. The cloth and metal bits will become stone colored, but the "skin" portions will retain their normal blue coloring and texture.

The stoneskin infusion also covers nearly all of your dye channels. I say nearly because some outfits have dye channels devoted to glowy effects Such as the sparkles on the starborn outfit, or the scrolling text and ... shields? on exosuit outfits. How much do you like your exclusive dyes? Edit: dyes do affect how much detail your character will have while stoneskin is slotted.

If you add a Polyluminescent Undulating Refractor to an upgrade slot, or use a Hylek Hue potion, you will change the color of your entire character. The orange refractor or orange Hylek hue potion grants the golden color. The purple is from the blue Hue potion. A teal refractor will make you teal. A black refractor will turn you into a living shadow in full sunlight, and into a dark blot in shadow.
https://i.imgur.com/Z5eOESqm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/cNLNMUcm.jpg? https://i.imgur.com/VEnYSghm.jpg?1 https://i.imgur.com/klAmWF5m.jpg?1 https://i.imgur.com/T2mnvCXm.jpg?1

The Stoneskin infusion can be bought at The Eye of the North from the Defense Seal vendor. You can only buy one stoneskin infusion with defense seals, you can get more Stoneskin infusions if you Buy Deldremor supply boxes and are willing to chance the very low drop chance. You can recover your stoneskin infusion from your equipment by using an infusion extractor bought from a golem in the fractal lobby.

Polyluminescent Undulating Refractors can be recovered from amulets found in trick-or-treat bags from Halloween events (more rng) or bought from the trading post. To recover a refractor you need to use an upgrade extractor from the gemstore or a blacklion salvage kit also from the gemstore, the salvage kit will destroy the equipment. Other salvage kits do not recover upgrades, they salvage them, which means the upgrades are always destroyed and possibly turned into lucent crystals.

Ascended Halloween amulets have Polyluminescent Reverberating infusions on them, these add a colored outline to your character's clothing and will block the color change imparted by the refractor, though only on the clothing portion. The Reverberating infusion will also give the stone a wet glossy look, though the "shine" will be the color of the reverberating infusion.  If you want to combine these effects you will need to equip the item that has the reverberating infusion after you have equipped the item with the refractor.  Map changes will scramble the load order of your visual effects, this may require you to unequip and re-equip items with visual effects.  I recommend having your visual infusions and visual upgrades on separate equips for this reason.  https://imgur.com/dSefC8a  https://imgur.com/Z1F9m1c  https://imgur.com/ERrZwmH

It is possible to convert a refractor into an Undulating infusion. An undulating infusion will have the same color changing effect as a refractor. The process of converting a refractor is fairly long if you don't run fractals regularly, it can be slightly shorter if you participate in raids. The recipe requires a +9 agony infusion that also grants a +5 bonus to a single stat (strength, toughness, expertise, ect.)

Hylek Hue potions can be purchased with karma from Heart vendors(only the ones who are giant frogs) in Sparkfly Fen. The hue potions are Soulbound on acquire and last 5 minutes each. The stoneskin infusion tends to remove detail from your character's face and gear. Freckles and facial contouring disappear. The stoneskin infusion also tends to give characters resting kitten face (a constant annoyed expression) https://i.imgur.com/oCb0ZbPm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hHt15qVm.jpg

Edit: since dye quality affects equipment and outfit texture, premium hair colors may also affect how textured your hair is.  It is the difference between stoney hair and a misshapen blob.  It could also be that the premium hair styles have more dye channels for the premium colors to affect. it may be best to use both.  I don't have a permanent hairstyle contract, so I could not experiment much.
An annoyance I encountered is that the stylist's preview does not show infusion effects in the preview, there was much trial and error regarding eye, mouth, and eyebrow shape as well as hairstyle selection. The Vermillion Wings seem to be the only really dye-able feathery wings. Edit: the seraph wings are now an option and aren't nearly as saturated. It is worthy of note that the Vermillion wings backpack and glider both have very saturated dye channels. I had more success by avoiding exclusive dyes. The colors in exclusive dyes were nearly always too dark or blindingly bright.

https://i.imgur.com/D2RBwhlm.jpg?1 https://i.imgur.com/avJXhY0m.jpg?1 

Sadly, the preview window for dyeing outfits and equipment also neglects to show visual infusion effects.

I suppose I will eventually grow tired of my monochrome look... eventually

https://i.imgur.com/suqttjem.jpg 

It's not a look for me, but it's actually come out really well without being overly an eyesore either

I recently found out that dyes can affect the stoneskin, via texture detail and brightness of the stone.  Enameled jungle and enameled emblaze seem to give the most detail. The other enameled colors impart less detail, other premium dyes give even less detail, and colors like aqua satin (though a premium dye) are no better than rare or common dyes.  

a rare dye: https://imgur.com/YRcclA4

Shadow Abyss dye: https://imgur.com/0p43hVm  note that it is much darker than whatever rare dye I used earlier

one of the other enameled dyes: https://imgur.com/Yb1rmnm

enameled emblaze: https://imgur.com/EqGwOtn

It could be that what material each dye is suppose to color may also affect the texture( cloth, metal, leather).  Dyeing a metal surface using a cloth dye may not show the metal's texture properly through the stoneskin. That thought only recently occurred to me, and I have not investigated that.  Edit: another thought: are some skin tones more detailed than others? do darker skin tones produce darker stone? Edit: pale 2 and dark 6 don't seem to show any difference in brightness when stoneskin is slotted. 

It seems that premium hair colors add detail to the stoneskin appearance.  Premium hairstyles don't necassarialy add detail.  You need a hairdye capable of both bright highlights and dark strands of hair.  even if a hair color gives you orange and yellow streaks in a hair style you still may end up with a blob for hair when you use stoneskin.  The light and dark contrast is important.  A few of the default hairstyles actually do this, but you still need a premium dye with strong contrast to see it well with stoneskin.

The starborn outfit with an orange refractor first with premium dyes, and then with all dye channels filled with enameled emblaze:   https://imgur.com/2uM4flD  https://imgur.com/8uNo6q7 

I dunno.. I like my black stone dude.  

Or not black.