Bengal cats are one of America’s most popular exotic pets, behind bearded dragons, snakes, and lizards. Bengals are not often seen, as they are typically kept indoors. Before purchasing one of these cats, thoroughly understand their care requirements and temperament. Next comes the fun part: choosing the Bengal of your dreams. Bengals can have various patterns and shades in their fur, from rosettes to spots, and are also available in several colors.
Bengal Coat Patterns and Colors
The Bengal cat breed is one of the most recognizable cat breeds in the world. They all look like leopards with marbled coats and are usually energetic with bright green eyes. They can also have tan rosettes on pure white fur or even be predominantly black with rosettes. It all depends on what type of domestic cat the Asian leopard cat is. Let’s look a bit closer at the different variations.
Marble Bengals
The fantastic and highly popular marbled Bengal is what dreams are made of, or at least they are when wishing for your dream cat. The marbling of the Bengal coat is typically dark brown or black, whereas the cat’s body is a light beige or taupe with beautiful swirling stripes and asymmetrical circular spots.
The lovely coat pattern was introduced in 1987 along with Jean Mills’ kitten, Millwood Painted Desert, who expertly modeled it. Bengals also have different types of marbled coat patterns. Specifically, several marbling variations are found on a Bengal, such as reduced horizontal flow, horizontal flow, chaos pattern, tri-color marble, high mileage marble, high acreage marble, bullseye marble, and sheet marble.
Chaos Marble
This is characterized by randomly placed swirling spots and splash marks in random sizes and shapes. Some believe the chaos pattern marbled Bengals to look like lightning strikes on a darker background. These cats are highly popular for their wildcat looks.
Tri-Colored Marble
Naturally, tri-colored Bengals have three colors in their fur: the background, the shade of the rosettes or marble markings, and the much lighter shade that resides inside the swirl. They are also gorgeous, but it can be hard to figure out whether a Bengal is tri-colored or something else.
Bull’s Eye Marble
As far as the official standard of what a Bengal cat should look like, this is not it. The bull’s eye marbling is the least desired marbling of them all. It is thought that having a tabby cat in the cat’s genes creates circles along the cat, with a small bull’s eye marbling in the very center. Breeders avoid patterns like this to maintain the actual wild cat image.
Horizontal Flowing
In this type of fur pattern, the marbling occurs along the top of the cat’s body from the shoulders to the rear end. The horizontal flow of the marbling down the cat’s body from shoulder to tail gives it an elegant and sleek look.
High-Acreage Marble
This type of marbling is slightly different from the others because, though marbling is present, it’s the background color that covers the most space. It presents stunning marbling, more than other marbling types, on a dark surface of smooth fur.
Sheeted Marble
This type of Bengal fur pattern is the opposite of high-acreage marbling, where the background is prominent and brings out the smaller marbling areas. Sheeted marble describes a cat with marbling covering most of its body and minimal background color present.
Silver Bengals
The lovely silver Bengal also comes in different variations. The coat itself is a calm tone without any warm shades sneaking in. The background can range from dark steel-like silver to almost pure white. These cats are exotic-looking, with their dark patterns and swirls standing out boldly against their light-colored fur.
Silver Bengals come in several variations of color, including blue silver, charcoal silver seal lynx, silver seal sepia, silver snow, and cameo. These cats can be bred with the other colors of Bengals to produce something entirely different.
When a silver Bengal is mated with a brown Bengal, it produces a silver Bengal. When mated with a reddish-colored Bengal, it creates a softer, fawn-like cameo. It has a neat effect on the solid-colored Bengals, as it looks like smoke is swirling off of their coat. This can be especially beautiful on the black or charcoal Bengals since it is reminiscent of a black leopard’s coat.
Snow Bengals
Snow Bengals do not fall far from the ghostly appearance of the silver Bengals. They, however, do not possess dark gray/charcoal swirls and marblings. Their markings are much lighter and faint to the naked eye. They have a tannish/taupe color that goes nicely with their powdery-white coats.
They can also come in brighter white shades or more of a creamy, milk white. This distinction can symbolize a Siamese or Burmese cat in their family tree. These cats may also have sky-blue crossed eyes, which Siamese are known to have. This is due to the albinism gene present in their genetic makeup. Contrary to the name of their fur color, these cats are never solid white. Their coat tends always to be off-white.
The main snow Bengals are seal lynx, seal mink, and seal sepia. It is not easy to tell the difference between the three. It takes a trained eye to know which variation of a Bengal you are looking at. The snow seal sepia Bengal does not have bright blue eyes like the seal lynx or seal mink variations. Instead, its eyes are either green or bright golden.
Black Bengals
Black (melanistic) Bengals are not necessarily 100% solid black; instead, they have mostly black on their bodies instead of marble. The bright orange-brown is the perfect contrast to the dark color. The coloring is caused by the agouti gene present in their makeup.
Black Bengals are like miniature black panthers or leopards. They are elegantly sleek, go with everything, like exotic cats, and have faint rosettes or swirls in a darker black covering their coat.
