Dock icons stuck in light-mode after booting Macbook in safe-mode

[amok-san]

Hi!

After booting my Macbook Air M2 in safe-mode to check something, the Finder, Safari, Mail icons in the dock are stuck in light-mode.
Changing the appearance in system settings has no effect.
Anybody else with this problem?
Does anybody know how to reset the settings or which .plist file to trash?

Edit:
Others have this problem, too:
Apple forum

 

[benholt]

Safe boot on Tahoe rebuilds parts of the IconServices database, and if you come back to normal boot before it's fully repopulated the dock ends up caching the intermediate (light-only) icon variants. Killing the Dock alone won't do it because the cached bitmap already made it into IconServices.

Sequence that worked for me: quit System Settings first (it holds a reference), then in Terminal — sudo find /private/var/folders -name 'com.apple.iconservices*' -exec rm -rf {} + followed by killall Dock and killall Finder. If icons still come up light-only, one more pass on /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store and reboot normally.

The dock plist itself isn't the culprit — trashing com.apple.dock.plist will lose your layout without fixing the icon variant. It's the IconServices bitmap cache under /var/folders holding onto the stale appearance.

 

[amok-san]

Brilliant, thank you so much!