Possible Burmese ColourS

You will notice in the photos above that the 4 different tortie colours are quite different, which many people do not seem to know or understand. The colouring of a tortie refers to the base colour. For example… A brown tortie (also often referred to as a Brown Cream) will have a brown base to her coat and the cream tones intermingling throughout her head and body. Similarly, a chocolate tortie (also often referred to as a Chocolate Cream) has a chocolate base and the shaded cream tones intermingled throughout the coat, and so on with the Blue tortie and Lilac tortie.

The Brown tortie has the most contrast of the tortie colours, which makes it the most mottled and the most obvious tortie colour. The Lilac tortie, however, has the least contrast of the tortie colours, with the tones being the most blended, and it is therefore the least obvious tortie colour. People often wrongly classify the colour of a lilac tortie, labelling her as a lilac.

As mentioned at the top of this page, the 4 tortie colours only occur on female cats because the tortie colouring comes through on a female gene. Often, tortie shades do not become evident until the kittens are 2 or 3 weeks old, or even older.

At first, I wasn’t personally a fan of the tortie coat. I felt that they looked like a Moggy cat (not that there is anything wrong with a beautiful Moggy, but why pay for a Pedigree to get a cat that resembles a Moggy?), but my husband insisted that if I had to get yet another cat, it had to be a tortie. I reluctantly gave in and got myself my first tortie, and I fell in love for many reasons.

Firstly, she had so much spunk to her, the title of “Naughty Tortie” was well suited to this ball of mischief. Even though I thought she look a bit Moggy-like, she had the Burmese PURRsonality through and through! She was the most easy-going, affectionate Burmese and produced stunning kittens for us for many years.

 The other thing that I’ve learned to love about torties is that they really are very unique. You will never see two torties the same; I can go to a cat show with five other Blue torties in it, and still point out my girl from across the room without hesitation. I can’t usually do that with the solid colour cats, the solid colours do tend to look much more uniform than the unique variety you’ll find in torties. If you go a cat show with six or more Chocolate adult female cats, all of good type, you will find that the breeders are constantly looking at the cage numbers before attending to a cat so that they don’t attend to a cat that isn’t theirs.

I now am a bit of a tortie addict and have owned Brown tortie, Blue tortie and Lilac tortie cats. I expect I may have to keep a Chocolate tortie at some point should the right girl come along.

Having owned a tortie I would never look back and I think a lot of our customers would say same.