Moreover, an allele can be either dominant (will be written in CAPITAL letter) or recessive. On the other hand, if the two genes are different, the genes are called heterozygous. If the two alleles are the same, this genes is called homozygous. As every pair of chromosome is composed of two chromosomes, for every genes your cat got two alleles (version of the gene) : one coming for the mother and the other coming from the father. And each chromosome of your cat wear of a version of genes. On each chromosome, you find a lot of different genes, that define all of the physical characteristics of the cat. For each pair, one chromosome is coming from the father, and the second one is coming from the mother. A good way to recognize the colors is often to look at the nose leather’s color.Īdvanced: Genetics Some genetics reminderĮach cat have 19 pairs of chromosome. Warning: The lilac and fawn or the chocolate and cinnamon can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from each other, especially in pictures! Depending on the lightning, those colors can easily be confused. The eye color can be blue, green, copper, golden, odd eyed. Their nose leather and toe beans are pink. These cats are entirely white without any markings. The coat color can be divided in three categories: the black based colors, the red based colors and white. In each article, I will try to keep it simple, but I will add some genetics information for the cat color nerd among us!Īt the end of this serie, you will know everything about cat coats.įor this first article we will start simple with the base coat color. Therefore, only part of the cat hair is colored, which can give some silver reflect to the cat.įinally there are some other factors which are breed specific and quite rare in house cat to which I will also dedicate some specific articles.

It will also be detailed in a following article.įifth, the cat can have some tippings, meaning that the color is not uniform on the hair. Some cats have white spots on their bodies while others don’t. Once more, I will detail everything regarding the different pointed patterns on a following article.įourth, are the white spotting. A famous example of pointed pattern is the colorpoint pattern which is the one of siamese breed cats. This color repartition is associated to the pointed patterns. For some cats, the density of color is the same on the whole of its body, but for some others, their extremities can be more colourful or darker. I will speak further about those tabby markings in a specific article. Those marking we spoke above can be of different kind of pattern. If a cat is not tabby, then he is said to be ‘solid’ or ‘self’. Being tabby means that the cat has some markings and a ‘M’ marking on its face. Second, you have to determine if your cat color is tabby or ‘solid’/’self’. But it certainly is not the only thing that is important. The first parameter that determine a cat coat is its color. These components add up together to define the coat of the cat.

The coat of a cat is determined by different things : In this serie of articles about cat coats, we will answer all of these questions!īefore I begin, let me clarify some terms that I am gonna use.

One of these could be : “ is it true that all tricolor cats are female ones ?”. Moreover, most cat lovers make the mistake of mixing up colors with breeds, as the siamese for exemple.įinally, there also are some legends that we all heard of about cat colors. But for some others it can really be tricky to identify their coat. One question a cat owner often has is: what is the color of my cat? For some, their color can be easily determined, as for black and white cat for example.

Lavender tabby cat