Change MySQL default character set to UTF-8 in my.cnf?

Currently we are using the following commands in PHP to set the character set to [UTF-8][1] in our application. Since this is a bit of overhead, we'd like to set this as the default setting in MySQL. Can we do this in /etc/my.cnf or in another location? SET NAMES 'utf8' SET CHARACTER SET utf8 I've looked for a default charset in /etc/my.cnf, but there's nothing there about charsets. At this point, I did the following to set the MySQL charset and collation variables to UTF-8: skip-character-set-client-handshake character_set_client=utf8 character_set_server=utf8 Is that a correct way to handle this? [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8