What’s the difference between a calico and a dilute calico?
Color, quite simply. Cats with a tricolored coat, whether standard or diluted, differ in the intensity of their colors. A dilute calico cat can have a coat that is tinged with gold or silver coloring, and its fur has much softer shades of cream, gray-blue, and white patches.
What Is a Dilute Calico Cat?
When considering a cat’s coat, you can substitute the term “diluted” with “muted.” The tricolored coat of diluted calicos is identical to that of calicos, but the dilute gene makes the colors appear muted and faded. The orange will dilute to a strawberry-hued blonde, the black to gray, and the white to cream.
Dilute calicos are also called calamanco cats or clouded tigers.
You’ll often hear tortoiseshell and calico used interchangeably. Although they look similar, tortoiseshell and calico cats are not the same.
Tortoiseshell cats also have tri-colored coats. But the colors show up very differently than they would on a calico. White must be one of the colors of calico cats, with the other colors appearing as patches over the white. Tortoiseshell cats don’t have white. Moreover, their colors are combined and blended rather than showing distinct color patches.
As we previously discussed, there are numerous breeds of calico cats, though not all of them can produce calicos. The breeds that can produce the calico coloring include:
What cat breeds can be dilute calico?
Since the dilute calico isn’t a breed in and of itself—rather, it’s named for its coat pattern—a sizable number of short- and long-haired cat breeds can yield stunning tri-colored kittens. They include:
- Maine Coon
- Persian
- Norwegian Forest Cat
- American Bobtail
- Japanese Bobtail
- Manx
- Scottish Fold
- American Shorthair
- British Shorthair
- Ragdoll
- Turkish Angora
- Siberian