All About Tuxedo Cats: The Coat, the Myths, and the Famous Ones

One of our two cats, Louis, is black and white, and for years I called him a tuxedo without thinking twice about it. Then I actually looked into it, and it turns out he isn’t really a tuxedo at all. He’s mostly white with black patches, black over the ears and around the eyes, split by a white blaze down the middle of his face, and a couple of big spots down his back, which puts him further up the white-spotting scale (which means he’s just got a lot more white than a real tuxedo does). But he’s exactly what got me curious, because most of what I’ve seen written talks a lot about personalities and history, and it seemed, well, not true. So I wanted to investigate.

First, the thing everyone gets slightly wrong: it’s not a breed

You won’t find a tuxedo on the list of cat breeds. It’s a term for the coat, not the lineage. A tuxedo is simply a black-and-white bicolor where the white is put in all the right places—chest, belly, paws, and sometimes the chin—giving the feline an air of formality. You can see it in any number of cats, from a run-of-the-mill shorthair at the shelter to a Maine Coon, a British or American Shorthair, even a Turkish Van.

In the eyes of a geneticist, this is a mild case of what’s known as white spotting: a little bit of white on an otherwise unbroken color. Put in some more and you start to get a “cow cat” or one that’s mostly white with patches of color here and there. The tuxedo is on the neater side of the spectrum: a well-proportioned amount of color with a clean white bib and a pair of mittens!

Why the white is where it is

OK, we’re about to get technical! A 2016 paper from the Universities of Edinburgh and Bath, published in Nature Communications, turned an old idea on its head. Scientists used to think that as a kitten develops in the womb, the cells that give it color spread across the body in a neat, planned-out way. This study found the opposite: those color cells actually multiply and drift around at random as the embryo grows, with no set plan for where they end up.

It’s what makes for a tuxedo pattern. The cells begin at the spine and back; they only get to the paws, chin, and underbelly last, if at all. Put in a mutation that puts the brakes on the cells and you won’t have enough to go around. The areas they don’t make it to are the ones left bare. So you end up with a cat that has some color up top and white on the bottom. A tuxedo is really no more than the pigment running out of steam before it can put on the socks.

About that famous “tuxedo personality”

If you have a tuxedo cat with an outlandish personality, I have good and bad news for you. The bad news? Telling your friends your tuxedo cat is THAT way because it’s a tuxedo is, well, probably wrong. The good news? They have that amazing personality because that’s just how THEY are!

There’s no research to suggest that a cat’s markings or color say anything about what kind of cat it’s. What we do have in the way of studies is rather limited. Take a 2015 survey from UC Davis: it showed that some owners said they got more pushback from tortoiseshells and calicos at the vet, which is the origin of “tortitude.” But it was a minor thing, rooted in how the owner perceived it, and for the most part, it comes down to the individual.

Then there was a UC Berkeley paper that was even more revealing. It seems human observers have a habit of ascribing certain qualities to a cat because of its coat, regardless of whether those qualities are there. (You know, the whole orange cats are less smart theory). In other words, a lot of the so-called tuxedo personality is US making of them what we want to see.

My own black-and-white cat is certainly a character, but then again, I have an orange-and-white who is just as full of herself in her own right. Tuxedo fans aren’t wrong about the personality they see; they’re just responding to the cat, not the suit. As the internet has it:

While we’re clearing things up: two more myths

There’s another myth out there that tuxedo kittens are the first to open their eyes, a day ahead of the rest. Great story, but it’s not true. Any kitten will have its eyes open in about a week or so, and because tuxedo is a pattern and not a breed, it doesn’t alter how a cat develops. The whole thing is just a weird, made-up tidbit that has been going around for awhile.

Some also believe that tuxedos specifically were revered in old Egypt and populate the tombs. I put some time into tracking down an actual source for that and came up with nothing but pet blogs referencing one another, which makes it hard to point to real history behind the idea.

Ironically, the cats in Egyptian art are overwhelmingly tabbies, sandy and striped like their wild ancestor the African wildcat, which is what you see in the famous scenes: the cat sitting under a chair, or the one hunting birds in the marshes. The range of coats we see today came much later. Researchers who traced cat coat genetics found that even the swirled ‘classic’ tabby marking didn’t become common until around the medieval period, thousands of years after the pharaohs. So there almost certainly weren’t any tuxedos padding around the tombs to revere in the first place.

The famous tuxedos who deserve a place in history (well, aside from your tuxedo, of course!)

If tuxedos don’t quiet have the ancient mythology we thought, they more than make up for it as documented public servants. The list of tuxedo cats in politics include:

• Socks was Bill Clinton’s cat and lived in the White House from 1993 to 2001, a black-and-white cat named for his white paws and, for a while, one of the most photographed animals in America.
• Simon served aboard the Royal Navy frigate HMS Amethyst and is the only cat ever awarded the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of a top military honor, after being wounded during the 1949 Yangtze Incident and continuing to keep the ship’s rat population down.
• Palmerston held the title of Chief Mouser at the UK’s Foreign Office from 2016 until his retirement in 2020, complete with a rivalry with the Prime Minister’s cat down the street.
• Tuxedo Stan ran a campaign for mayor of Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2012 to raise money and awareness for feral-cat welfare. He couldn’t formally appear on the ballot, but the campaign, endorsed by Ellen DeGeneres and Anderson Cooper, helped push the city to fund a spay-and-neuter clinic.

And in fiction, the tuxedo is practically the default cat: Felix the Cat, Sylvester, Figaro from Pinocchio, and Mr. Mistoffelees, the magician cat from T.S. Eliot’s poems and the musical Cats, are all tuxedos.

If you’re thinking about adopting one

The best reason to seek out a tuxedo cat is also the most honest one: they are adorable, and they’re widely available since the pattern is common. And black-and-white cats, like black cats, tend to sit in shelters longer than those with lighter coats. That’s always a good reason to go searching for one!