chat

hello my follow steemians

pelages, dresses and colors in the cat: the complete file!
The types of coat, colors, dresses and patterns that are possible in the cat are numerous, be they characteristics of a race or the happy fruit of the chance of nature!

Hundreds of combinations exist, all breeds combined, and not all are listed or standardized. We invite you to discover the most popular coats and dresses as the rarest.

Pelages, dresses and colors in cats

The types of coat in the cat
By fur is meant fur, so the type of hair a cat can have regardless of its color. There are five main types:

short hairs
half-long hairs
long hairs
curly hairs
naked cats
The latter are devoid of fur and have a light down. Among short-haired cats, we can cite some gutter cats (although there are various lengths of hair at home), Siamese, Chartreux ...

The best-known representatives of the medium-length hair are Maine Coon, Norwegian, Burmese ... The Persian cat, meanwhile, is the only breed that has a really long hair, other breeds often cited (Angora, British Longhair ...) with rather medium length hairs.

In fact, the "long hair" category tends to encompass both types of coat. Finally, the type "curly hair" includes breeds such as Selkirk Rex and Devon Rex, which have a short or medium-long coat, or frizzy, with loops more or less tight.

The different dresses at the cat
Cats have a great variety in terms of colors and patterns (also called patterns or patterns in English). We then speak of a dress to designate the physical appearance of the cat as a whole, including colors and patterns. This is where the story gets complicated, because the possible configurations are numerous and the nuances of each so to speak infinite!

To start with the simplest, the solid color dresses are eight: white, black, blue (gray in everyday language), chocolate (variations of brown), lilac (pink beige), cinnamon , red (or orange), and fawn (of the English fawn) which is a light beige drawing on the red (cinnamon diluted).

However, the list is far from exhaustive, since these colors are the only officially recognized but there are many other colors, such as caramel, apricot, amber and light amber.

Possible patterns in the cat
In addition to the basic color of the coat, patterns more or less marked can adorn the dress of the cat. In addition to the plain coat, there are two-tone dresses, tricolor, tabby (striped), colourpoint and calico.

The tabby
The tabby pattern, which more commonly refers to tiger or striped cats, has several variants: marbled (wide bands all over the body), tabby (vertical stripes, thinner), speckled (stripes and small round spots) and finally, tiqueté (slight scratches on the head, legs and tail, the rest of the body being uniform with hairs having a degraded color of their base at their end). The Abyssinian cat is the typical example of this last tabby pattern.

The colourpoint
Then, the colourpoint pattern designates any light basic dress, darker in certain places than are the region of the face and muzzle (mask), the ears, the tail and the ends of the legs. The true colourpoint cats are born normally white and keep the blue eyes: it is the case of the cat Siamese, Burmese, certain Persians ... Different types of colourpoint exist according to the color of the extremities, which can be brown (seal point) , blue (blue point), lilac (lilac point), red (red point) ... We also note the tabby point, which has stripes on the colored ends.

The two-color
The cats of two-tone dresses obviously have two colors, which can be in various patterns according to the distribution of each. Thus, according to the distribution of the white, we will have dresses called "van" (white largely dominant, only the ears and the tail are of color), "harlequin" which presents a little more color, and the true two-color ones which must present an equal proportion of colors. For example, a two-color may have the upper body color and all the white underside.

The tricolor
The tricolor dresses are also complex! Indeed, as for the two-color, the distribution can be done in different ways and the colors can be distinct or more mixed. There are three tricolor patterns: tortoiseshell (the three colors are intertwined), calico (or white scale, that is to say that the dress has white areas and defined spots of each color) or tabby (tricolor striped). The colors of the tricolor dress are always black (or gray), white, and red or brown more or less diluted, which can draw towards chocolate, beige, cinnamon