What do Siamese cats look like?

What do Siamese cats look like? We don’t know what the definitive Siamese cat looks like. This is a strange state of affairs. For all other breeds bar the Persian, we have a more or less definitive appearance of the cat and it is all written down in the breed standard but for the Siamese confusion reins. We are all over the place.

Back in the good old days of the early 1900s and the era of Clark Gable and Fred Astaire, there was one type of Siamese cat; a normal seal pointed animal of elegance and balanced conformation. My mother had a Siamese cat in the 1960s and she was what we all expected a Siamese cat to look like – just like the cats we see below with these film stars…

Then they (the breeders) decided to ‘refine’ the animal and we were taken on a journey of confusion leading to the end result: a rat faced variant of super skinny proportions. A totally unnatural looking cat which is meant to be more ‘refined’ but which actually looks bizarre and is an example of crazy extreme breeding.

There are various variants of the Siamese from the applehead to the old-style to the classic to the modern to the Thai to god knows where….

The original Siamese as imported from Siam (Thailand today) was very popular with film stars in the middle of the 20th century as evidenced by the copious amount of photos of these celebs and their cats, always a Siamese.

These pictures show us the ‘normal’ Siamese cat. For contrast I have published one of the skinny, modern variants. The classic pointing is seal coloured: dark brown/black. Today there are many other colours for the dark extremities of the cat such as blue (grey), lilac and red (flame).

Above all else the Siamese cat is known for its ‘pointing’ which refers to the dark extremities of the face, ears, legs and tail. These areas are cooler and the gene that creates these darker colours is temperature sensitive. You will see older Siamese cats with dark flanks because older cats have poorer blood circulation resulting in a cooler skin and darker fur.

Below are more photos of the range of Siamese cat types:

Early Siamese Cats
Early Siamese Cats. The pictures are in the public domain. The collage is by Michael at PoC.
Siamese cat types
Range of Siamese cat types.



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