People love using labels to describe and mark things, events or even each other. It’s easier to stick a tag on something than to understand it. The same thing happens with genes. If a gene creates an unusual look, then it gets labeled as “designer”, which by the way, is still a very elegant way of naming things. This is nothing new in the breeding world, it was always like that. Let's start with a little history lesson and go back to the 1920s. The chocolate and lilac genes.

Not every pastel is what it seems. And not every blue is actually… blue. There’s a little gene (we call it dilution - “d”) that changes the way colour shows up in a cat’s coat — or skin, if you live with a Sphynx. It doesn’t wipe out the pigment; it just spreads it differently. Think of it like mixing paint with water. The colour’s still there, just softer. But here’s the catch: That only happens if the cat gets two copies of the gene (d/d) — one from each parent. Just one?