Switching skins on objects using skins

I am working on a farming game along with my classmates, and we want to know if it would be possible to change the skin of our plants when they are sick, I had it working on placeholder objects, but on our actual meshes we use a skin for the base and a skin for the planes. When we try to switch skins now the leaves turn grey like when something has no texture.
We were hoping that there would be a way to simply make two unhealthy skins and apply them, another solution we thought about was switching the data block to one that had both looking sick, but this would cause animation clipping, and another was to recreate the unwrap with the planes in the main unwrap and recreate all the plant textures, this would obviously be a lot of recreating things we've already done, and not be the best use of time. We would greatly appreciate it if people here knew a method to change skins on an object using two skins already.