The sense of sight is one of the finely tuned and very important sense. The cat eye is particularly well-adapted to it’s unique needs for hunting and nocturnal activity. Cats also use their eyes as tools of expression — the shape or luster of an eye modifies subtly with cat emotion. This article intends to bring you information on the color and purposes of the eyes of a cat.
The cat, like us, can narrow or widen it’s eyes to express emotions. A cat also has a third, eyelid common to many hunting animals, which comes from the cat’s inner side of the eye and protects the eye from debris and moisturizes the eye. It is not seen very much.
The domesticated and breeded cat has a wide array of colored eyes which depend greatly on fur color, breed, and the colored eyes of parents and grand parents. There are many different shades of eye color, and each can also change depending on the light they are exposed to and sometimes even the mood of the cat.
The most common eye colors are colors within the “middle” of the spectrum; greenish-yellow to gold. Deeper and usual colors like rich greens or bright coppers tend to be rarer. Some eye colors are very specific to pelt color — pointed cats always have blue eyes, while cats with white markings around their eyes (including all white cats) have blue, gold, green, or copper.
A lack of pigment in the eyes, blue eyes might be considered the most enchanting color of eyes, and are classified as part-albino because of the lack of pigment. True albinos have pink or red eyes; or very faintly blue-pink eyes. They come in a variety of different shades — from a dark, flat blue to a crystal-like pale blue. Pointed cats always have blue eyes, and blue eyes are also common in solid white cats. Cats who are white and have blue eyes are often deaf (as in the case of Snowkit, Speckletail’s son). Other colored cats with blue eyes are exceptionally rare.
Yellow eyes range in color from a dark orange to a bright, sulfur yellow. The common eye-color gold also belongs to the yellow eye family. Brown eyes are also somewhat rare, so I have no given them a place of their own in the article, and will group them here with yellows.
Like blue eyes, green eyes have a pretty range of colors, from a deep ivy green to a very pale bright green. Green eyes (like the human eye color hazel) often have amounts of yellow in them, or appear to have blue in them as well.
Odd-eyed cats are not actually that uncommon, but none have appeared thus far in the Warriors series! They appear in white solids, and a cat may have one blue eye, one orange eye, one blue eye and one green eye, one blue eye and one yellow eye, as well as other combinations. In cats there are two types of albinos: blue-eyed albinos, with eyes that are blue-gray are more common then “true” albinos, which have red eyes.
|Gold||gld||Dark yellow with a hint of green|
|Siamese Blue||sbl||Royal blue to medium grayish-blue|
|Dominant-White Blue||wbl||Medium blue|
|Dominant-White Odd||odd||One blue, one orange|
|Albino Blue||abl||Very pale blue, almost gray|