• CFA states there is no such thing as a pure red cat, and that all red cats are red tabby with tabby markings either very obvious or very faint.
  • CFA notes that red kittens are usually born with tabby markings which may or may not fade as the adult coat comes in, and that cream kittens' faint markings usually disappear by about nine months.
  • Orange is caused by a 5 kb deletion at the X linked ARHGAP36 locus, identified in 2025, which makes melanocytes produce red and yellow pheomelanin instead of black and brown eumelanin.
  • Because the gene is on the X chromosome, a male needs one copy to be orange while a female needs two, and a female with one copy becomes a tortoiseshell or calico instead.
  • Sex linked orange is known in only two species, the domestic cat and the Syrian hamster, which the 2025 paper offers as the likely explanation for the absence of calico dogs and mice.

What to look at

  1. Look for the M on the forehead, which CFA's written tabby pattern definitions place in both the classic and the mackerel patterns.
  2. Look at the legs and tail for bars and rings, which usually survive even when the body markings have faded almost to nothing.
  3. Name the body pattern. Narrow vertical pencillings are mackerel, broad swirls with a solid blotch and rings on each side are classic, discrete spots are spotted, and no body pattern at all on banded hairs is ticked.
  4. Read the shade. A deep rich red coat is a red tabby. A pale buff coat is a cream tabby, which CFA notes is often born with faint markings that usually fade by about nine months.
  5. Check for a ticked look. If the body has no clear stripes or swirls, CFA's ticked tabby pattern still allows bars on the legs and tail.
  6. Check for any black in the coat, because even a small patch moves the cat out of orange tabby and into tortoiseshell, calico or patched tabby territory.

Why orange cats are more often male

The gene sits on the X chromosome, and that is the whole explanation. The 2025 Current Biology paper describes orange as appearing in hemizygous males carrying one copy and in homozygous females carrying two, while a female with one copy and one ancestral allele becomes a tortoiseshell or calico instead. A male has one X, so a single copy makes him orange. A female has two, so she needs the deletion on both to come out entirely orange, and inheriting it once produces a patchwork rather than a ginger cat. That asymmetry is why orange skews male, and why an all orange female is less common than an all orange male without being rare.

Orange hides the pattern, it does not remove it

Solid color in cats comes from a deletion in ASIP that removes the banded agouti hair. Orange works differently: the ARHGAP36 deletion switches pigment production toward red and yellow pheomelanin, and it sits genetically downstream of the melanocortin 1 receptor rather than switching off the pattern genes. The result is that the tabby markings are still made, just in a lower contrast pigment, which is exactly what CFA reports to breeders when it says every red cat is a red tabby with markings that are obvious or faint. The 2021 Animal Genetics work makes the same observation from the research side, noting that ghost patterning bleeds through in orange colorations when a cat is young or as it ages.

What a photo can and cannot tell you

A photo answers the pattern question well. The forehead M, the leg bars, the tail rings and the shape of the body markings all read off a daylight side on shot, and a close crop of the flank will show whether faint markings are present in a cat that looks solid at a distance. What a photo cannot do is turn orange tabby into a breed, because it is a color plus a pattern and CFA treats both as coat descriptions. Orange tabbies appear in pedigreed Maine Coons, Persians and Abyssinians and in very large numbers of unregistered cats. A photo also cannot determine sex, which needs a look at the cat rather than the coat.

Related guides

  • Tabby cat: Tabby is a coat pattern, not a breed.
  • Tortoiseshell cat: A tortoiseshell is a cat whose coat mixes red with black, chocolate or seal in a mottled pattern with no required white.
  • Torbie cat: A torbie is a tortoiseshell with tabby markings inside the color.

Sources