Cat colors, patterns, and fur lengths are a cat’s calling card. we include these characteristics when referring to specific types of cats. for example, we would call the fictional cat garfield an exotic shorthair red tabby.
note the color, pattern, breed, and length of the coat in the name. The Cat Fancy, or community of feline enthusiasts, cat show judges, breed registries, breeders, and others who study and love felines, gave us these designations to make cats easier to identify.
This may seem hard to believe, but cat colors basically include black, red, white, or some combination, dilution, or mixture of these. It almost doesn’t seem fair when birds turn 15 vivid colors like pink, green, blue, yellow, and purple.
“Birds get their brilliant coloration due to the chemical structure of their feathers and amino acid modifiers, which is different from the coat textures of cats, where pigmentation is based on melanin types,” says Joan miller, representative of the cat fanciers association. and professor of education and recognized expert in cats.
cat colors: what coat colors can cats have?
basically, when it comes to cat colors, cats are black unless they’ve inherited the sex-linked orange masking gene, in which case, they’re red, miller explains. by red, we mean what is commonly called orange.
“The hundreds of colors and patterns displayed in the coat of domestic cats are due to modifying factors including genes and polygenes, which change these two basic colors,” he says, giving an example of gene dilution, that changes the cat colors from black to blue (commonly called grey) and from red to cream.
polygenes, genes that many others of their kind require for their effects to be observable, then determine whether the coat color tone will be a dark steel-gray blue or a pale pale blue, he explains. these inherited polygenes are controlled by selective breeding in pedigreed breeds. If you’ve studied cats for a long time, you probably know that calico and tortoiseshell cats, those with black and red fur, are female. that’s because the orange gene is carried on the sex-linked x chromosome. because males are xy with only one x chromosome, they can only be black or red (or variations of each due to modifying factors).
since females are xx, they can be either black or red. “This is how we get the striking tortoiseshell females, which have black fur with hints of red. if the diluted factor is inherited, the queen will be blue-cream. if a cat also inherits the piebald white spotting factor, then this female may be a tortoiseshell and white bicolor, or a calico tricolor cat with large black and red areas on a white coat,” Miller says. peeps are spots or patches that are unpigmented or white.
read more about cat color and paw genetics and the effect >>
the tabby pattern
When it comes to cat colors and coat patterns, here’s a mind-blowing fact: all cats are tabby. “Whether or not they show their tabby pattern depends on whether the cat has inherited the dominant agouti gene or the recessive non-agouti solid color gene,” he explains. “However, even solid-colored red cats will show a tabby pattern because the sex-linked chromosome is not affected by the non-agouti gene. solid-colored kittens sometimes show their underlying tabby pattern when young before their kitten fur sheds and the adult coat grows. furthermore, when an adult cat with a solid coat lies in the sunlight, its underlying tabby pattern can often be faintly seen.” the tabby pattern includes the characteristic “m” mark on the forehead and four basic types:
- classic tabby cats, also called spotted tabby cats, have a combination of stripes, whorls, spots, and what looks like a bullseye on the sides of the body.
- ticked tabbies have bands on each hair shaft with a lighter color at the base, creating an iridescent mottled appearance but no streaking on the body. Abyssinians and Somalis are this type of tabby.
- mackerel tabbies have continuous vertical stripes on both sides of the body and a dark spine line running from the shoulders to the tail.
- spotted tigers are just that. the size of the dots and the spacing between them vary. Ocicats have large fingerprint spots, Egyptian maus have randomly placed, high-contrast spots of varying shapes and sizes, and Bengals have rosette-shaped spots, according to Miller, “but randomly bred cats often they have broken mackerels or classic stripes giving them a spotted appearance.”
- There is also a pattern called patched taby. these are cats with any of the four tabby patterns, but also showing extra patches of red due to their inherited, sex-linked orange gene, explains miller.
the spiky pattern
Here’s another interesting point about cat colors: The point-restriction pattern gene gives Siamese and related breeds their pointy pattern, or a light-colored body with darker colors on the limbs. the gene must be carried in both the male and female for either kitten to be pointy.
“The gene is sensitive to temperature, which restricts color to the cooler extremities of the body: the face, ears, feet, tail, and testicles,” explains Miller. “It is part of the albino series and modifies the color tone so that black appears dark brown on a light fawn colored body. the genetic mutation, chocolate color, and its diluted version, lilac, were also observed in the first Siamese cats. Tonkinese cats, which are a mix of Siamese and Burmese, have a more subtle point of contrast called mink coloration.
Siamese cats got their name from the ancient kingdom of siam, where they originated. “These cats caused a sensation when they were first imported into England in the mid-19th century,” says Miller. “When Siamese twins first arrived in the United States in the early 20th century, they quickly became popular as pets, leading to the spread of the recessive pattern of point restriction across the country. it is still hidden in the genotype of many randomly bred cats and appears in litters when both sire and dam carry the gene.”
hatch patterns
another thing to keep in mind when talking about cat colors? shading, characterized by color at the ends of the hair with a pure white undercoat. Three types of shaded cats include: chinchilla, shaded, and smoke, each distinguished by the extent of the shading on individual hairs.
in chinchillas, only the tip of the guard hair, or outer coat, is dyed. with the shaded pattern, a quarter of the guard hair furthest from the cat’s body exhibits the color. in the smoke pattern, the half of the guard hair furthest from the cat’s body shows the color. when a smoky pattern cat is standing still, the coat pattern may appear solid, but when the cat moves or is petted, you can see the white undercoat.
bicolor and tricolor
with the colors of cats, people love to talk about bicolor cats, which are white and any other color. the cat may have some spotting, even just a white patch, or it may be mostly white with a bit of the other color. the colored area in bicolor cats may also have any of the tabby patterns.
“The bicolor and tricolor patterns are created by the incomplete dominant pius white-spotting gene,” says Miller. “Polygenes help determine the amount of white in the cat’s coat. black bicolor cats with only a small amount of white, like a “bib”, white paws, and perhaps a white facial “blaze” are “tuxedo” cats. the other extreme is an almost entirely white body with color only on the tail and perhaps one or two spots on the head or body. This is called the ‘van’ pattern in reference to the cats that were found in the Lake Van area of Turkey centuries ago.”
Calicos are white females with large solid areas of black and red patches, as well as other colors such as blues and creams. they can have a little white, a lot of white, or anything in between.
tortoise shells, or torties, are known as pied in cat fancy dress. Like calicos, these cats are female, except they are black with random patches of red. black and red can also be diluted blue and cream. a dilute turtle is a blue female with patches of solid cream or chocolate with red or lilac with cream. the patches on the tortoise shell may also have a tabby pattern.
cat color chart:
colors and personalities of cats
the university of california, davis, surveyed 1,200 cat guardians in 2015 and published the results in the journal of applied animal welfare sciences. Respondents were asked to choose a color category that best represented their cat and to answer questions about their cats’ colors and behavior. the results seemed to confirm the reputation of calicos and tortis being feisty and unpredictable.
in another survey, researchers from the university of california, berkeley, and california state university, east bay, asked 189 cat guardians to assign the terms: active, aloof, bold, calm, friendly, intolerant, shy , stubborn, tolerant and trainable, to five different cat colors: red, tricolor, white, black and bicolor. the results showed that respondents were more likely to attribute friendliness to orange cats, intolerance to tricolor cats, and indifference to white cats.
Please note that these were surveys of human perceptions, not scientific studies controlling for other potential influencers of personality, such as gender and coat length. Calicos and torties are female, which might play a bigger role in personality than coat color. Long-haired cats are generally believed to be docile, while short-haired cats are assumed to be energetic.
I have two red tabby longhaired house cats that come from the same litter. some of my friends can’t tell them apart, and one cat could double as a stunt double for the other. but when it comes to personalities, the two couldn’t be more opposite. one greets everyone who comes to our house; the other one has enough love just for me and my husband.
More studies are needed before we can conclude that cat colors influence personality.
cat eye colors
Another interesting point to keep in mind when it comes to cat colors: cat eye colors. all kittens are born with blue eyes. At about 6 to 8 weeks of age, “their final potential eye color starts to become apparent,” says Miller. “Full shine is not achieved until a cat reaches maturity.” full maturity can take one to two years, depending on the breed of the cat. “There are only three basic eye colors,” says Miller. “However, the eye color of domestic cats is striking and very varied. Interestingly, the bright copper eye color of a Persian, the deep golden eyes of an Abyssinian or Bombay, and the emerald green eyes of a Russian Blue all derive from the same gene. It is through years of selective breeding that this extreme spectrum of eye color has been honed into the breeds. random bred cats often have greenish-gold or hazel eye color; however, a colony of free-roaming cats as a result of natural line breeding will often develop a golden or lemon yellow eye color.”
Some cat eye colors are linked to coat colors or patterns. for example, white cats may have blue, yellow, gold, or strange eyes. “Any cat that has inherited the piebald factor may have an odd eye color—one blue eye and one gold, yellow, or greenish eye,” says Miller. Cats with the dot-restricted color pattern, such as the Siamese, have blue eyes due to a gene that is linked to albinism. Tonkinese often have aquamarine eyes. “Tonkinese displaying the deeper Burmese coat colors (sable, blue, champagne, or platinum) will have gold or green eye color,” says Miller.
thumbnail: photography by xseon | blind.
This article was originally published in 2017.
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