My little pet peeve

Rosiemac said:

Me being one of them..

If someone has Auburn hair l would call them red,  but i've never seen an Auburn coloured cat?. But an orange cat is orange or ginger to me

  

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Ginger means red.

MeuzettesMom said:

Isn't he too dark for a cream?

My Julie was a blue cream tabby

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There are many different shades of cream, just like there are shades of red. Some are darker than others. It's hard to explain (again, english is not my first language) but usually you just know what you are looking at (but even better if I can see a pedigree if I'm unsure).

Julie looks like a blue tabby with white to me in that pic, not a blue tortie, do you have any pics of her back side? I can't see the cream in this one. 

She is a blue tabby on the top of her.a spotty mackeral

Yes she was a cat with unknown origin, one of a kind, bossy girl

I thought the brown along the white was cream.

Well anyway, just discussing colors. Hope i didn't take anything away from the original poster. Sorry if I did. Red, orange, ginger,cream. they are all good kitties

otto said:

Ginger means red.

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Yes where you come from, but in the UK their orange or ginger 

 

MeuzettesMom said:

She is a blue tabby on the top of her.

I thought the brown along the white was cream.

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It's normal for blue tabbies to have that 'creamish' tone in them, specially in the tummy, legs, near ears, but it's not genetically actually there. If it were, they would be blue tortie tabbies and there would be clear spots of cream in random places, not evenly like your kitty has.

I think your kitty is blue spotted tabby with white. Very cute kitten pics! ^_^

And to add tho the 'ginger' thing, over here it's a plant/spice, I've never heard of anyone using it as a color term in this part of the world. Is the flower of it red or what's the actual connection to the color?

Now I am really confused, lol.

Was my (RIP) Harley Cat a light red tabby or was he a cream tabby?

He was marked down as a buff red tabby on his vet form, and the vet used to joke that his fur matched his (auburn) hair.

Here are a couple of pics below.

Harley was a "surprise" christmas present 15 years ago by my then boyfriend. He outlasted the boyfriend lol

Anyway, I didn't know anything about cat breeds other than I knew what a tabby was and what a persian was and some other basic breeds. I didn't know anything about what colors were called. I just thought he was light orange. I'm an artist BTW so I call colors what they look like to me in reference to the color chart.I now know, thanks to this site, that cats are not orange, but red. But I still call Harley orange in general conversation because that is what he looked like to me. I did more research when I was planning on adopting my new kitten because I wanted to make sure I did things right for him and I had not had a kitten in a long time. But even in my research I concentrated more on diet / nutrition and other general health and behavior issues, I hadn't bothered with researching color. Of course, my new kitten is easy because he's just black and as far as I know that's the correct term for it lol.

I would call your beautiful Harley a red tabby with white.

I've always wanted a dilute calico, which I have always called a blue and pink kitty. :heart3:, just a little fancy of mine, the "pink" is actually cream.

I've had the priviledge of living with 2 red boys, one before the other, neither lived to old age, Baby was not even 15, and Tolly was only just past 12. I've had many other cats too, all cats are special, but red boys, to me, are really something beyond special. Incredibly sweet, forming very deep bonds.

Many cats carry the red gene though. My "brown" tabby Mazy cat has reddish tufts. Queen Eva, my black girl, in certain light appears to have a red aureola, as if every hair is tipped with red. Calicos, and torties, obviously, with their red patches/bits.

I can't think of any shade of Red cat as "orange". It offends me to hear a red cat called "orange", it feels...belittling to me, demeaning to the cat, to call such a majestic creature "orange". I don't know why, but there it is.

(and some people, once they know about this peeve, will find any number of ways to make a point of calling cats orange, knowing it grates.:lol3: Petty as my peeve, really)

Cream and white.  Right? Northern Glow?

My guess might be wrong.

Interesting about colors huh?

How they vary.

Harley was handsome.

My ex tried to mussle in on the cats territory. Tried to make me put down few to make room for him. Nope.

Rather have the love from the cats. Atleast that is real and true.

redvelvetone said:

Now I am really confused, lol.

Was my (RIP) Harley Cat a light red tabby or is he a cream tabby?

He was marked down as a buff red tabby on his vet form, and the vet used to joke that his fur matched his (auburn) hair.

........

I didn't know anything about what colors were called. I just thought he was light orange. I'm an artist BTW so I call colors what they look like to me in reference to the color chart

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MeuzettesMom got it right, definitely a cream tabby (with white).

I'm an "artist" too (very bad at it, hence the "s, not a professional), so I can see that you probably hate it when people call carrots yellow and violet blue (or vice versa).

I happened to like animals a lot, specially cats and dogs, as a kid, and read lots of books about them etc. because I wasn't allowed to have a pet. So while I was encouraged to paint and draw and obviously learned about colors while doing that, at the same time I was teaching myself stuff about cats. The cat color thing really started to bug me when I was 7 and my mom started to hang out with this guy who had a purebred blue Persian (and the pedigree obviously said he's blue). They were together for 7(?) years, so I kinda pretended the kitty was mine, Herakles was his name. He made me pay much more attention to cat colors, so I kinda never thought about 'genotype or phenotype colors' to have anything to do with 'artificial colors' like crayons.

And to add to the annoying color terms: white tigers are not white! They're silver (they have the inhibitor [chinchilla] gene with albinism gene, like my seal silver shaded point Luna for example).

otto said:

Many cats carry the red gene though. 

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Red color can't be carried. It is dominant like black and will always show if it's there.

Question: is it true black cats are really tabby. Maybe that depends on what breed they are huh? But I was told there are no solid colors that they are all tabbys underneath.

like my brown tabby is really the same

as my black cat

Yes and no. They are genetically different: a solid black cat is non-agouti, meaning he hasn't got the gene to add pattern to his coat, black (brown) tabby is an agouti which means he has a pattern in his coat. That's pretty much their only difference. A solid black cats usually show a 'ghost pattern' in sunlight/flash light, like black panthers (which are non-agoutis as well). The pattern showing underneath is pretty much what pattern the cat would have become if he was an agouti cat. And you can see what pattern he carries (spotted, mackerel classic tabby) if bred to a tabby cat. As an exception smokes which are non-agoutis too do show some pattern, but they are genetically solid color cats. So all solid cats carry a tabby gene.

Usually purebred cats don't have ghost patterns as they have been bred to have very solid color as little marking as possible, this is very difficult in red cats though, so almost all of them show a ghost pattern and only their pedigree (or DNA-test) will help to determine whether they're solid or tabby.

My black kitten definitely has no ghost pattern. I had heard about that as well and looked. He does have grey fur at his roots though, and some reddish brown (faded black or rusting I guess) but I have seen no patterns. I have seen these patterns on some other cats though so I know what you  mean.

And thanks for the explanation about Cream cats. I had no idea. I see I have some reading to do.

This is our kitten Magnus. You can see some of the brown and grey in his fur, but no ghost pattern (although maybe that is hard to see since he has very long hair?)

You see more of the grey when I don't use the flash on the camera, but it's mostly on his ruff and on his belly, though it does not show up very well in my photos so far.

redvelvetone said:

My black kitten definitely has no ghost pattern. I had heard about that as well and looked. He does have grey fur at his roots though, and some reddish brown (faded black or rusting I guess) but I have seen no patterns. I have seen these patterns on some other cats though so I know what you  mean.

And thanks for the explanation about Cream cats. I had no idea. I see I have some reading to do.

This is our kitten Magnus. You can see some of the brown and grey in his fur, but no ghost pattern (although maybe that is hard to see since he has very long hair?)

You see more of the grey when I don't use the flash on the camera, but it's mostly on his ruff and on his belly, though it does not show up very well in my photos so far.

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Yeah, ghost patterns aren't very visible in longhairs. Even tabby longhairs have sometimes hard time showing a proper pattern (like my silver tabby Utu for example). It's also harder to keep a longhair cat in a 'good black' color as it fades to brown or greyish very easily.

Cream is the diluted version of red (like blue is of black etc.).

Queen Eva is a ghost tabby. I call them her secret stripes. They only show under certain light.



I read recently that black cats who show rust have a certain nutrient deficiency. I don't remember what it was though, but I'll try to find it. Queen Eva, in spite of the aureola I described earlier, does not have any rusty fur. She is often matte black, and sometimes glossy black.



She also appears to have a rainbow spectrum, in sunlight.



As for that Picture of Harley, being called cream, it must be a difference in screen views. On my screen he looks very red, unmistakably red.

He looks on my screen just as red as this sweet boy, my Tolly Bridge Angel



This one really shows his true colors

otto said:

This one really shows his true colors

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This kitty is very clearly a red tabby. Harley is very clear example of a cream tabby.

Your sweet Tolly (very beautiful cat, and I am sorry for your loss) does look darker than Harley did. He was not as light as some cats I've seen who are more of a buff color, but I guess he's not dark enough to be true red either. He was a strawberry blonde

As for the rusting in black cats, I read about that recently as well.

It could be true. Magnus was a feral up until about 8 weeks ago. I've had him for 6 weeks. He's been getting high protein wet foods from me since then. (I believe the rescue group was feeding him Fancy Feast before I got him, and I'm not sure what he was eating when he was feral, though I know a lady had been putting out food for him). So it's entirely possible he had some nutritional deficiencies. Hopefully I am correcting that....

also Queen Eva is a real beauty, but I think she knows that

Interesting about Magnus' color. If I saw that on my own, I would have guessed a black smoke.

My Meuzette is a long hair black and white. She had brown on her sides. I thought that was faded from the sun since she too came from out there. But maybe it is her color pattern. I will know when she grows out again from her clipping this fall.

This has turned into a very nice discussion. I learned so much from all of you.

NorthernGlow said:

Yes and no. They are genetically different: a solid black cat is non-agouti, meaning he hasn't got the gene to add pattern to his coat, black (brown) tabby is an agouti which means he has a pattern in his coat. That's pretty much their only difference. A solid black cats usually show a 'ghost pattern' in sunlight/flash light, like black panthers (which are non-agoutis as well). The pattern showing underneath is pretty much what pattern the cat would have become if he was an agouti cat. And you can see what pattern he carries (spotted, mackerel classic tabby) if bred to a tabby cat. As an exception smokes which are non-agoutis too do show some pattern, but they are genetically solid color cats. So all solid cats carry a tabby gene.

Usually purebred cats don't have ghost patterns as they have been bred to have very solid color as little marking as possible, this is very difficult in red cats though, so almost all of them show a ghost pattern and only their pedigree (or DNA-test) will help to determine whether they're solid or tabby.

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It is that agouti factor. OK Interesting. If it is harder to get a solid red. Then would red be considered domanated by the agouti gene? More so than a black cat?

Thank for this. Clears that jumbled up mess of mine, called my brain. My information was all bunch up in a knot.