Heyyyy I'm making a Cat Picrew (genetically accurate one), and I already have base colours, dilution, rofousing (partially), and now I finished caramel for black based colours, but I have small problem I can't find good pictures of apricot cats for reference. I struggle to find trustworthy sources, and when I found two pictures that kinda are trustworthy, the lighting and quality of the photos are really bad, so I wanted to ask if you have any pictures of apricot cats.
(I found pictures of pointed apricot cats, but I need to see some non pointed to see how it fully works on the cat's body)
Thx for the response♡
There are a few in this document, and then:
Apricot tabby and two apricots with a red tabby from here
Apricot silver tabby bicolor
Make sure to share the picrew when it's ready, i'd love to try it!
i was curious if you could explain how the apricot gene works— i heard its a modifier for red, but i’m not sure what it does beyond that! also, do you know anything about “peach” australian mists? ive heard its just another word for fawn, but i was wondering if you knew anything different, since its a new breed and i can only find conflicting sources
Hi!
Apricot is just caramel but on a cream cat! The dilute modifier gene makes dilute cats a little warmer and brighter, though we don’t know how it does this (and I usually have a theory but I really have no idea here).
Also, I hadn’t really looked at Australian Mists before, they’re super neat! They have random ticking in their tabby pattern, and are also pale colored in general. It makes for a very pretty cat! You’re correct that peach is fawn - they renamed cinnamon to gold and fawn to peach, probably because they’re so much lighter they don’t really look cinnamon/fawn anymore!
Does caramel just colour the hair differently?? Or does it do something more to the hair??
From the caramel messybeast article: it also clumps the pigments, but differently.
"In dilute coloured hairs, the pigment granules are grouped in elongated oval clusters, with streaks of elongated pigment granules between them, rather than being evenly distributed along the hair shaft. In dilute modified hairs, pigment appeared to be grouped in round clusters, regularly distributed, and with no visible streaks of pigment. This suggests the Dilute modifier results in a difference in pigment deposition. The microscopic study of caramel and apricot hairs showed the melanosomes to be smaller, more numerous, and a more regular spherical shape in caramel and apricot hairs than in the non-Dm dilute hairs." (Emphasis mine)
How can I tell that cat is caramel/apricot?? When I look at cat pictures that are caramel, then I just can't tell if it's normal cat or caramel cat. With blue, I can kinda tell, but otherwise, I can't. Lilac caramel looks like off fawn and sometimes like cinnamon.
Fawn caramel looks kidna still like lil darker normal fawn.
And apricot looks just like a little bit more red-ish cream...
How can I tell if they are caramel?? It's really hard to nitpick tints and shades...
(Also, how can I tell Lilac and Blue apart?? Lilac can be more brownish, I know, but most lilac pictures are looking really greyish.
These all are lilac, but some look just like normal blue...)
Caramel is very rare. Honestly I simply don't start to suspect caramel unless the breeder/some expert specifically says it's caramel (this way i eliminate all false positives. very effective 😆).
But to actually answer: "One of the characteristics of the Caramel Tabby and Shaded is the distinctive metallic, aluminium like sheen, which is particularly visible across the neck and top of head." (x). I'm not sure how well that can be photographed.
Felinefractious had a post about blue vs lilac a little while ago:
💬 2 🔁 162 ❤️ 560 · How do you distinguish between lilac and blue? Especially in cool-toned lilacs and warm-toned blues, they look exactly
And i'm sorry, but how reliable are your sources on these cats being lilac? Because i'm really not sure about the third
Norwegians don't have caramel, so no data on amber (but i don't see why not), however burmese very much do, so russet yeah, totally!
In the New Zealand Cat Fancy (where most russets are) caramel russet is an accepted color, their Standard of Points for both Burmese and Mandalay includes it.
Caramel Russet: Underparts, flanks and head warm light apricot. Fur on the upper parts has two to three bands of colour; buff nearest the skin, then brownish blue to warm beige, then a warm light apricot tip. In some cats the apricot tip is so wide it replaces the brownish blue to warm beige entirely.
so I learned from the Sacred Texts (aka messybeast) that caramels only work on already diluted cats. However balearcat.com lists chocolate-based caramel on their EMS (along with blue-, lilac-, fawn- and cream-based caramels). Any idea what this could be?
Everything i can find on the internet suggests the caramel effect is restricted to dilutes. Maybe someone wanted to register their bb D_ Dm_ cat like that so people know it can throw caramels? I know ee O-/OO norwegians are sometimes registered dt or et even though the amber isn't visually expressed on them.
Dilute modifier (): This unidentified gene further lightens the color of a diluted cat, the coloration becomes more brownish.
dominant allele: Dm - (variant)
recessive allele: dm - (wild type)
blue, lilac, fawn -> caramel
cream -> apricot
I put here a cat in all three diluted colors to compare them with the caramel tabby. It's hard to spot the differences, isn't it?
Since this is a dilute modifier, the D allele covers it, and we can only see its effect on cats with dd genotype.
It can be found only in a few breeds: orientals (including related breeds) and burmese. To our current knowledge, of course.
Extension (melanocortin 1 receptor, MC1R): This gene replaces eumelanin with pheomelanin resulting in a yellowish or reddish furred cat. The change often happens gradually during the first years of the cat's life.
dominant allele: E - eumelanin remains, black adjacent cat (wild type)
recessive alleles: e, er, ec - pheomelanin takes over, yellow/red adjacent cat: amber, russet or serdolik (variant)
All three recessive variants are new mutations found recently in different breeds: the color amber in the 1990s in norwegian forest cats, the color russet in 2007 in burmese, and the color carnelian or serdolik in 2018 in kurilian bobtails (at least that's the first mention). We don't know anything about their interactions, or their effects on cats outside of their respective breeds.
The gene only affects eumelanin, so the O allele is epistatic over the it. However, because of the properties of the overpowering pheomelanin, every e allele is epistatic over agouti, so the tabby patterns will show up on aa cats as well.
Wide band (serine peptidase, CORIN): This hypothetic gene makes the yellow bands on the agouti hairs wider, resulting in a lighter, yellowish pelt.
dominant allele: Wb - eumelanin on normal sized area, darker cat (wild type)
Ohhh, citizens of tumblr, we're really in it now. So. In the moment, we have, I believe, three mutations found on this gene: the sunshine (wbSIB) and extreme sunshine (wbeSIB) in the siberian breed, and the copper (wbBRI) in british cats. (I only show the sunshine and the copper here.) The novelty of these mutations means that the breeders still often call them simply golden instead of the new names, so it's difficult to find reliable data. Further complicating the situation, most likely both breeds have more wide band gene(s) beyond CORIN, and especially the copper cat above is the result of the combination of several wb genes.
Karpati (?): This unidentified gene makes the extremeties (face, ears, legs, tail) white kinda like a reverse colorpoint cat, and causes a roaning effect: scatters white hairs everywhere on the body.
dominant allele: K - whited extremities, karpati cat (variant)
recessive alleles: k - normal pigmant production, full colored cat (wild type)
Karpati seems to show intermediate inheritance with significantly more white on a homozygous then a heterozygote cat. This gene is studied for a very short time, and mostly on heterozygotes since they are much more common. The cats appearence changes during their life and also with the seasons: they born very similar to a fever coated kitten but with white ears, then to the end of their first year they almost completely lose all white (at least the heterozygous cats - the homozygotes become darker but still keep strange white patterns like the cat in the header, who the same cat but older as the above depicted KK one), then slowly gain it back as they age.
The karpati mutation is present in the stray cat population in middle-east Europe (including Hungary where I live, wahoo! and indeed, I can regularly see one or two karpaties in facebook adoptions groups and such). It's also introduced to some established breeds (LaPerm, Sphynx) and the creation of its own breed also began under the Transylvanian name.
