Unffornatuly you can't disable the appearance, but you can add another appearance. So if you want to re-assign the appearance you should select those faces and give the specific appearance to each face. If several faces have the same appearance I recommend you to make a "selection set"
Then when you want to give it the appearance you want you skip to select face by face, only the set you want the same appearance .

so you can select tha faces of each appearace, and when you want to give it the last appearance you skip the select face by face, only the set you want the same apperance .
Another tool you can use is "component color cycling toggle"

So it has a description what it does.