Simple and short description with photos of different colours of Siberian cats

Silver and Smoke Siberians

Different types of Silver:

• Shaded Cameo/Shell Cameo - Kittens born white with tipping gradually appearing.

• Shaded Silver/Chinchilla Silver - Kittens born with dark markings and/or tabby markings - particularly on the tail, which disappear by 4-6 weeks. A chinchilla silver may be so light that it looks like a white cat, but because neither parent is white, the kitten cannot be a white. Green eye color on a white cat with silver parentage is a good sign that the cat is a chinchilla silver, not a white.

• Shaded Tortie/Shell Tortie - The cat may look like a shaded silver or a chinchilla silver, but will have just a small patch, or even just a few hairs, of cream and/or red, or will have mottled black and cream paw pads. Those small differences will make the cat a shaded tortie or shell tortie, not a shaded silver or chinchilla silver.

• Smoke - Often difficult to tell from solid color kittens except that smokes sometimes have white around the eyes and a paler stomach. May take some months to tell which kittens will be smoke because the full coat color is sometimes not seen until the adult coat comes in at 2 years. Undercoat begins to show at 3 weeks, and by 6-8 weeks have a mottled look.

SMOKE OR SHADED?

• 1/8 of hair length colored at tip - chinchilla and shell

• 1/4 of hair length colored at tip - all shaded

• 1/2 of hair length colored at tip - all smoke

Golden Siberians

Golden tabbies are different than warm brown tabbies because their undercoat is peach colored, as where the undercoat of a brown tabby is gray. Goldens often are easily recognized by their pink nose and black eye liner.

Siberian cats had both silver and golden areas of fur and were dubbed “bimetallic.”

"Bi-metallic" describes a visual effect, while "sunshine" is the (current) proposed genetic name. In Siberian Cats, sunshine-silver produces the bi-metallic pattern.

Cats which have both colours, silver and the “siberian golden” , appears rarely, but there are still discussion "Is it something new than bimetallic or not?".