How to install an osu! skin

A skin is a .osk file, and a .osk is just a renamed zip. Installing one takes one action:

If you have a .osk

Open it, or drag it onto the running game. osu! imports it and switches to it immediately. This works the same on stable and on lazer. Nothing has to be extracted, moved, or renamed.

If you have a .zip, .rar or .7z instead

Some authors package a folder rather than a .osk. On stable: extract it, move the extracted folder into the Skins directory inside your osu! install (Options has an Open osu! folder button that takes you there), then press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S to make it show up without restarting. Pick it under Options → Skin → Current skin.

On lazer there is no Skins folder to move it into — see the lazer page. Zip the folder, rename it to .osk, and import that.

Where skins are stored

Client	Location
stable	the `Skins` folder in your osu! install, one folder per skin, named as the skin is named
lazer	`%appdata%/osu` · `~/.local/share/osu` · `~/Library/Application Support/osu` — but stored by file hash, not browsable. Why

Options worth knowing

All of these are in Options → Skin on stable:

`Ignore all beatmap skins`	Use your skin even when a beatmap ships its own. Does not cover hitsounds — that is the next one.
`Use skin's sound samples`	Your skin's hitsounds instead of the beatmap's.
`Use Taiko skin for Taiko mode`	Off by default, which is why a taiko skin can look like it did not install.
`Export as .osk`	Turns your current skin back into a shareable file. This is also how you move an edited skin into lazer.

Before you install anything: every skin here can be played in your browser first, on the same seven seconds, so you can tell whether the circles read the way you want without downloading a thing.

Steps and option names checked against the osu! wiki source, 2026-08-25.