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

There is no such thing as a tuxedo breed. “Tuxedo” describes a coat pattern, a black-and-white bicolor with the white landing on the chest, belly, paws, and often the chin, so the cat looks like it’s wearing formalwear. That pattern can show up in all kinds of cats: your average domestic shorthair from a shelter, sure, but also Maine Coons, British Shorthairs, American Shorthairs, Turkish Vans, and plenty of others. When someone says they have a tuxedo cat, they’re telling you what their cat is wearing, not what breed it is.

The “tuxedo” is really just a low-key version of what geneticists call white spotting, a small amount of white on an otherwise solid-colored cat. Add more white and you slide up a scale toward the “cow cat” look, then toward a mostly-white cat with a few colored patches. The classic tuxedo sits near the tidy end of that range: mostly colored, with a crisp white bib and mittens.

Why the white is where it is

OK, we’re about to get technical! This is the part I find great, and it comes from a 2016 study out of the Universities of Edinburgh and Bath, published in Nature Communications. For a long time, scientists assumed pigment cells in a developing kitten migrated in some organized, directed way to color the whole animal. This study found the opposite. The pigment cells actually spread by moving more or less at random while the embryo grows, multiplying and drifting as they go.

Here’s why that produces a tuxedo. Those pigment cells start out near the back and spine, and the very last places they reach, if they reach them at all, are the chest, belly, paws, and chin. When a common mutation slows the cells down so there aren’t quite enough of them to cover the whole cat, the spots they never quite reach are exactly those extremities. The result is color on the back and head, white where the cells ran out. That’s your tuxedo: not a design, just pigment cells running out of gas right before they got to 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 scientific evidence that coat color or pattern predicts personality in cats, and none at all for a distinct tuxedo temperament. The studies that do exist on color and behavior are narrower than people think. A 2015 UC Davis survey found that owners reported slightly more attitude from tortoiseshell and calico cats during things like vet handling, which is where the whole “tortitude” idea comes from, but the effect was small, based on owner impressions, and swamped by plain individual variation. And a separate study out of UC Berkeley found something telling: people assign personality traits to cats based on coat color, whether or not the cats actually differ. So a good chunk of “tuxedo personality” may be us seeing what the tuxedo led us to expect.

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

You’ll see it claimed that tuxedo kittens open their eyes a day earlier than other kittens. There’s no basis for this. All kittens, regardless of color, open their eyes somewhere around seven to ten days old, and since tuxedo isn’t a breed, there’s no mechanism by which a coat pattern would change developmental timing. It’s a cute stat that someone made up and everyone reposted.

And the various claims that tuxedo cats were sacred in ancient Egypt, or made up most of the cats in Egyptian tomb paintings, I went looking for a real source on those and found only pet blogs citing each other. As far as I can tell, the tuxedo is the one coat that never actually picked up an ancient legend. Which is fine. It’s been busy building a modern résumé instead.

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!