Thread: Changing colouring

Our kitten started off as a silver tabby and after a few weeks the fur around his nose turned brown, the brown fur is spreading - he looks superb and I am very pleased as the brown tabbies look lovely. Does anyone else have experience of this?

Lots of silver tabbies have warm brown/orange patches on their nose and face. If it spreads to the rest of the body then it is called tarnishing and normally grows out once the kittens grows it's adult coat.

Louise

Yes,we have one,Merlyn had & still does have quite a lot of tarnishing. It started off quite a deep mucky brown,more noticable on his nose, but as he grew it did lighten,so much so that the last time he went to a show the judge thought he was a tortie girl because a place towards his trousers had taken on the female colouring more.Now he is fully grown as Louise says it doesn't notice so much & he is a stunning silver boy,on the whole....!

Don't know if this will show it better,he was not amused at me waking him up to go poking round his trousers,at the moment it is more of an orange but during the summer it goes a pale peachy colour that you get in silver torbies.....
The fact that he shew a tortie trait was enough for the judge, they don't have to be completely coloured as we expect a tortie to look,a black cat with a very small cluster of white hair that you would hardly see would still have to be judged as black & white at a show,she thought he was being judged in the neutered male section by default & was looking to get him moved into the female section,she was quite surprised to find out that he was a European Premier Champion & was only there that day for Prize of Honour & that no one else had every been caught out.To be fair though when he was younger that spot was more the brown tarnish it was only at maturity it seemed to change to this & we had taken him out of show retirement to help make up the numbers that day...

Its really hard to get the colours right... when you register kittens say at 10 weeks they are covered in kitten fluff and its often quite tarnished from mum licking them clean. I've thought I've had red silver that have become cream silver shaded with age... at ten weeks two kittens in our last litter looked like they were blue cream (and white) but then from nowhere silver started to come through. The GCCF even like you to tell them if a Tabby is mack or classic, thats easy if they have a large enough area of tabby, but some torites have solid patches as well as tabby.

But a silver will not turn brown and vicsa versa; looking at the colour on thier ears helps of course not all browns have a warm beige background colour, some have a cold dirty grey look... the rule of thumb is that it is impossible for the mating of two browns to produce a silver kitten.

The Maine Coon Cat Club site has a gallery of MC colours which helps a bit.