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The combination of two genes for dilution (or blue) and two genes for chocolate in a black cat produces another colour: lilac (bbdd). The combination of two genes for dilution (or blue) and two genes for cinnamon in a black cat produces the fawn cat (blbldd). In the red cat two genes for dilution produces the cream cat. Chocolate genes have no visible effect in a red cat. Although the late Persian breederPiet Prosé in Holland is not the only one who thought that red Persianscarrying chocolate displayed a much brighter colour red. The gene that produces caramel cats is a dominant gene on a different locus:Dm. This gene is dominant, which means that having one single dilute modifying gene can alter a cat into a caramel, provided also two genes for dilution are apparent. This happens to blue, lilac and fawn cats that carry this gene. In cream cats, which also have two genes for dilution, the extra Dm gene alters the cream cat into the apricot cat. Cats with two Dm genes are homozygous for caramel, but can only produce caramel kittens when mated to blue, lilac, fawn and caramel cats or cats who carry the dilution gene. A caramel cat with one Dm gene (a heterozygous caramel) gives this gene to 50% of its offspring. A caramel cat with two genes for Dm gives one Dm gene to its entire offspring. But you cannot see this gene in red, black, brown, seal, chocolate or cinnamon cats, because the dilute modifier gene (Dm) is epistatic to these colours. This simply means that the colours black (brown), chocolate, cinnamon and red mask the Dm gene and thus they can carry the gene that produces caramel or apricot without showing it. So these red, black, chocolate and cinnamon cats can carry the Dm gene for caramel or apricot along for generations without anybody knowing it; as long as there are no genes for dilution (blue or cream) involved in breeding these cats, it will not appear. And it can come as a big surprise when a black cat carrying caramel, undetected for generations, and also carrying blue, is mated to a blue cat and a caramel suddenly appears out of the blue!! Thus caramel reveals itself only when the cat has also two genes for blue. This gene modifies the blue (or lilac or fawn) cat into a caramel cat. Blue changes to have a brownish tinge, darker than lilac, mud coloured almost. In tabby cats the caramel pattern gets a distinct metallic overlay. There is little difference between cats that are blue-based caramels and lilac-based caramels. The cats that are fawn-based caramels tend to have a much warmer ground colour and are very beautiful. In my opinion the solid coloured caramel cats (and caramel points too), are a bit dull compared to other colours and by far not as attractive as tabby caramel cats are. The metallic sheen of caramel contrasts beautifully with the warm ground colour in tabbies. I can still remember a gorgeous oriental caramel classic tabby I had to judge in the U.K. There is the same variation in caramel colour as there is in chocolate, blue or lilac coloured cats. So you will see paler and darker caramels, just as you can see paler and darker chocolates or lilacs. The cats that are fawn-based caramels tend to have a much warmer colour, pale warm brown with silvery metallic overtones. I think them quite beautiful. In red cats the dilute modifying Dm gene changes nothing, but it changes cream cats to apricot: a warm cream with a metallic sheen instead of the powdered effect of the cream. Caramel tortie point cats can be easily identified, as apricot is much hotter in colour than cream, while the caramel has that metallic overlay. Some bodies register cats with the red gene as they appear and call them all red tabbies. But it is more appropriate to register them in their genetic colour, i.e. red OR red tabby. Sometimes parents can be a clue to their genetic make-up. In a tortie you can easily identify a tortie from a tortie tabby: the tortie has solid black, chocolate, cinnamon, blue, lilac or caramel patches of colour, where the red, cream or apricot parts may be tabby. The tortie tabby MUST have tabby pattern in the black, chocolate, cinnamon, blue, lilac or caramel parts as well. If heritage is unclear breeding results from a red cat with a black, chocolate etc. cat can give a clue if this cat is red or red tabby. And please note the kind of tabby pattern (ticked, classic, mackerel or spotted), as that can be helpful when breeding further with this cat. Remember: tabbies can only come from cats with at least one tabby parent; two solid cats can never have tabby kittens between them. It is impossible for a caramel cat to appear in a litter of two blue parents, two lilac parents or two fawn parents. But sometimes a cat has not been registered in the right colour (the colour on its pedigree) and I have seen quite a lot of cats who had lilac, blue or chocolate spotted as colour on their pedigree but were in fact caramel coloured cats. For a caramel to appear in a litter, one of the parents must be black, chocolate, cinnamon or red and carry caramel OR be a caramel! The same rule goes for apricot cats. Two cream cats paired cannot produce an apricot cat, unless one of the parents is no cream but apricot. For apricot to appear one of the parents must be caramel, apricot or carry the dilute modifying gene. I have made some examples when breeding with caramel Orientals; just add points when breeding with Siamese: Caramel (homozygous blue based) x caramel (idem) = blue-based caramels: 50% homozygous, 50% heterozygous Caramel (blue based, one Dm gene) x blue = blue-based caramels 50%, blue cats 50% Caramel (blue based, one Dm gene0) x lilac = caramel blue-based 50%, blue 50%, all kittens carrying chocolate Caramel (lilac based, one Dm gene) x lilac = caramel lilac-based 50%, lilac 50% Caramel (lilac-based, one Dm gene) x fawn = caramel lilac-based 50%, lilac 50%. all kittens carry cinnamon Caramel (lilac based + cin. + one Dm gene) x cinnamon (+dilute gene) = 25% chocolate, 25% cinnamon, 25% caramel, 12˝ % lilac, 12˝ %fawn. In theory if you have 8 kittens 2 will be chocolate, 2 cinnamon, 2 caramel, l lilac and 1 fawn. Of these cats 1 chocolate and 1 cinnamon will carry Dm; of the caramels 1 will be lilac-based and 1 fawn-based caramel. You cannot see which cats will be the Dm carriers, but you can be sure the lilac and the fawn will be free of caramel. So if a caramel and/or apricot cats appears in a litter one of the cats must carry the dilute modifying gene Or one of the parents must be a caramel or apricot cat. In breeding caramel pointed and caramel tabby pointed kittens, I could not see much colour difference between blue-based and lilac-based kittens. Each time I got almost the same shade of caramel. But that was probably due to the fact that I had cats who carried many polygenes for light and warm. Lilac could be clearly distinguished from caramel in pointed cats at an early age, as it develops only slowly. Caramel pointed kittens develop their colour as quickly as blue or seal pointed kittens. Caramel tabby pointed kittens can be tricky if they also carry many polygenes for warm and pale colouring and especially if the cinnamon gene is also involved. Then it often takes more time for the caramel colour to develop than 3 months. And the colour in a caramel point changes all the time; sometimes it is more bluish, a week later it may have changed to more brownish overtones, which can be very confusing. When cinnamon is also involved in Siamese you might not know what colour kitten you have at first but have to wait a little longer. A good help is the pad- and nose leather colour. Fawn points have pink nose leather and paw pads, while fawn-based caramel points have a soft mauve colour. The hairs between their pads usually give a very good indication of the colour of the cat. A caramel cat (aaBBddDm) x a homozygous chocolate cat (aabbDD) gives 100% chocolate kittens with a gene for dilution (blue); 50% of the kittens are caramel carriers (aabbDdDm). When a caramel point Siamese (aaBBcscsddDm) is mated to a chocolate point Siamese who carries dilution (blue) (aaBBcscsDd), you can get the following kittens: caramel point Siamese, SP Siamese with genes for caramel & dilution (blue), SP Siamese with gene for dilution (blue) and homozygous BP Siamese, Although dominant, the Dm gene can only express itself when 2 genes for dilution (blue) are present. If this blue-based caramel cat (aaBBddDm) is mated to a blue cat carrying chocolate (aaBbDD) we can make the following diagram: Caramel female : aBdDm en aBd Blue male carrying chocolate: aBd en abd | aBBdd | aBbddDm | ------------------------------------ | aBbdd | aBBddDm | aaBBdd = homozygous blue aaBbdd = blue carrying chocolate aaBBddDm = caramel aaBbddDm = caramel carrying chocolate If the caramel also carries chocolate she is: aaBbddDm. Mated to homozygous chocolate (aabbDD) the result will be: | aBbDd | aBbDdDm | ------------------------------------- | abbDd | abbDdDm | aabbDd = chocolate with gene for dilution (blue) aaBbDd = black with genes for chocolate & dilution (blue) aabbDdDm = chocolate with genes for dilution (blue) & caramel aaBbDdDm = black with genes for chocolate, dilution (blue) & caramel This way you are able to make more diagrams yourself. Just try. In the seventies I imported a lilac point Siamese to Holland. I knew the breeder and the kitten's parents. I got pictures and he looked absolutely beautiful. So I went to pick him up at the age of 3 months, together with a pure chocolate point Siamese girl from different parentage. All went well, but it surprised me that at 6 months his colouring was quite well developed. He went to shows and became an international champion but was refused further titles because his colour changed so much. You must already know what happened: he was not a lilac but a caramel point. My "lilac" point mated the CP girl and the result was 1 SP and 3 CP kittens! I could not believe my eyes! Later I repeated the mating with the same result, again 1 SP and 3 CP kittens. They were all looked at by experienced judges and were really SP and CP. But then the father could not be a lilac! My cats all lived in the house and the stud cats had their apartments outside in the cattery, so the matings were all controlled. I sent 7-generation pedigrees from both cats and a lot of hair I clipped from my studs tail base, (I could not show him any longer because of his strange colour) to Roy Robinson and Patricia Turner with the question what colour cat I had. The answer from Roy Robinson was:" He is most probably a blue based caramel", otherwise he could not have sired these kittens. He was then re-registered as a caramel point. I had a lovely caramel tabby point from him; with my caramel tabby point I bred many caramel point and caramel tabby point kittens. She came from a pale coloured line from Springfield's Bambuli (a real milk chocolate line from the famous CP Ch. Kimoki Dagmar) and she carried many polygenes for light and warm and her kittens always looked pale caramel. In her litter I could always see the difference between caramel and lilac point kittens at about 6 weeks of age. Tabby point kittens proved to be more difficult, but when I looked at the hairs between their paw pads that colour almost always gave me the right indication of their true colour. I have seen the caramel colour for the first time many years ago when visiting the English breeder and geneticist Patricia Turner, in the South of England. They were called Oriental "Pastels" at the time. Pat Turner told me that the American geneticist Don Shaw called the caramel colour "Barrington Brown". He saw this colour first in the USA in Chinchilla Persians. Pat Turner used American chinchilla's imported to England in her breeding program to develop silver in her Oriental cats. Then this colour showed up unexpectedly. Pat Turner and her friends carried out a lot of matings to understand the natureof this gene. In some Tai-Bagheera cats in Germany, also bred with the help of American chinchilla cats (Jemari chinchilla's if I am not mistaken) to get silver Orientals; caramel popped up there as well. At a meeting about caramel, organized by one of the independent Cat clubs in Holland in the early nineties with Pat Turner and many independent judges in Rotterdam, Pat Turner told us more about caramel and we discussed caramel intensively. There also the name "taupe" was used for the first time for the blue-based caramels. One of the Dutch breeders invented this name for her caramels as she thought it fitted the colour of her cats better than caramel. She had rather dark toned caramel cats (originating from the German Tai-Bagheera lines) and the meeting agreed that it was a good idea to call the blue-based cats with the Dm gene taupe and to keep the name caramel for the lilac-based cats with the Dm gene. We saw caramel, lilac, blue and taupe cats in solid and tabby Oriental and Siamese on this meeting. Pat Turner promised to give the information about taupe and caramel to Roy Robinson, as she did. In Roy Robinson 3rd edition of Genetics for Cat Breeders he referred to taupe, but for the lilac-based caramels instead!When I bought the 4th ed. of Genetics for Cat Breeders this year, with very interesting new facts about many things, I discovered that taupe was still named for lilac-based caramel, which was never the intention. Fortunately the GCCF in the UK never used the name taupe, but kept using caramel for the modified diluted cats. The caramel gene has been carried by many of the first tabby point Siamese, as a silver tabby Moggie has been used to breed Tabby points. She must have had some Chinchilla's in her forebears, otherwise it cannot be explained. The only thing we know is that there lived a Chinchilla breeder in the samestreet where the Moggie has been found. And in the early days of catbreeding many cats were allowed to roam free. It took a long time before the caramels where recognized by the GCCF in the United Kingdom. They were registered as lilac point, lilac tabby point and lilac oriental (and sometimes blue or chocolate point) although they looked quite different. At some point you had to look hard to find a real beautiful old fashioned lilac coloured Siamese! Some lilac tabby points looked like they were carrying cinnamon, and that is what we thought in the beginning. We have some dedicated breeders to thankfor the recognition of the caramels.