All the world's cats are actually black, but genetics has slipped in some modifying genes that cause the differences in what we see. So, breeders used those modifiers to create the Ocicat as a ticked (agouti) cat with spotted tabby pattern. These beautiful tabby cats come in black, of course, but also, through genetic modifiers, come in chocolate and cinnamon too. The Ocicat gets modifiers for dilution from both the Abysinnian and Siamese, creating blue, lavender and fawn, and modifiers for silver from the American Shorthair part of its heritage, creating all six colors on silver, ebony silver, chocolate silver, cinnamon silver, and their corresponding dilutes, blue silver, lavender silver and fawn silver. The colors are all named for the spot color with the exception of tawny, our black color, which is named for the background color.

That means the Ocicat comes in 3 basic colors that can be expressed 4 ways, for a total of 12 designer colors. We have placed some examples below.