| AUSTRALIAN MIST STANDARD | RELATED PORTIONS OF ABYSSINIAN STANDARD | RELATED PORTIONS OF THE BURMESE STANDARD | COMMENTS (AND THOSE DOMESTICS!) |
| Clear
delicate shadings of green from chartreuse to aquamarine, the same for
all coat colours WITHHOLD FAULTS Blue, amber or orange eyes |
Colour green, gold or hazel, the more richness and depth of colour the better. Colour is the same for all coat colours. | Any
shade of yellow with golden-yellow preferred. Eye colour is the same
for
all coat colours. FAULTS Eyes with more green than yellow pigmentation |
Falls
well within the common colour range of the domestic cats - any shade of
green.
|
Australian Mist eye colour falls within the ‘natural’ cat eye colour range, and is more consonant with a burmese diluted coat than a gold eye, such as desired within the Burmese breed. However, the eye colour takes a considerable time to mature - while kittens may have green eyes, many have various shades of gold, generally with some slight ring of green around the pupil. In time (up to 2 years) these eyes will become green, and stay this way for life.
Colours which are designated as faults are never acceptable. While aquamarine eyes are allowed, as ‘any shade of green’, they run the risk of becoming blue as the cat ages, and I have observed these eyes turning khaki in later years in such cats, therefore it is probably better to avoid this eye colour where possible. Eyes which are definitely more yellow than gold implies, with hot bright orange tonings, or almost russet brown overtones are never likely to change colour to green. As such eye colour is intense, it is undesirable to use such cats for breeding as it takes more than one generation to correct the colour.
There are some lines of Australian Mist which have excellent eye colour - green right from kittenhood, but by far the most common case is that the eye starts as light gold with a green tinge, and changes by the time the cat is 18 months old to a good solid grass green. There is unfortunately no reliable way of breeding the correct eye colour - though it is very helpful if one parent has good green eyes - though even in this case, the progeny can be very varied, even within a single litter.
As our preamble states ‘Muscle development, coat and eye colour achieve adult expression by 2 years of age’, the Australian Mist is slow to mature in many respects, eye colour is perhaps the greatest source of disappointment in showing the young adult. This is more than compensated for in the longer term, where the mature Australian Mist remains a steady long term show proposition, a characteristic shared with the Russian, and the Korat, both breeds with the same pattern of eye colour development, and in contrast to Burmese, where the same tendency to green the eye with age contributes to excellent cats, otherwise at their peak of physical perfection, being overlooked because their eye colour has faded.
Truda M Straede