Types of Rare or Implausible Coloration by Species
General
- Lilac, Lavender, or Purple Eyes: Purple is relatively rare in nature. Purple's rarity is the reason why it's often associated with royalty.
Humans
- Red Hair: Red/auburn/orange hair occurs in only 2% of the human population. Fictional works have you believe that that hair color is more common than it really is.
- Green Eyes: In the real world, only 2% of human beings have green eyes, and the green eye trait has a slight female bias. Like with the red hair, fictional works have you believe that that eye color is more common than it really is.
- Red Hair and Green Eyes: Having either red hair or green eyes (especially the emerald shades common in fiction) is rare enough in humans, but having both is even more rare, even if female. Like brunettes, blondes, and ravenhairs, redheads are more likely to have blue, brown, or hazel eyes than green ones. Despite this, the Significant Green-Eyed Redhead trope would make you believe every third person has that combo. For more examples of that combination, see that trope.
- Red Hair With a Skintone Darker than Fair or Pale: While the original human redheads typically had olive or tan skintones, a majority of redheads have a fair or pale skintone that more often than not doesn’t tan well.
- Having an Ivory Skintone: Ivory skintones in human beings do exist in real life, but they are very rare. It was common in animated TV works in the past due to time and money constraints (just leave the character's skin uncolored), especially in the 1950s and 1960s when TV shows has shoestring budgets. However, instead of dying out, creating ivory skintoned human persisted. One reason this persists is because Raven Hair, Ivory Skin (which combines a very rare skintone with the most common hair color) is a great contrast.
Cats/Wildcats
- Being Male and Having a Tortoiseshell or Calico Pattern: They're both very popular, and rather common, patterns for domestic cats, however people don't realize that in essence only female cats can be calico, tortie, torbie, or caliby. Males are extremely uncommon (with roughly 1 in 3000 torties/calicos being male), usually intersex, being either chimeras, Klinefelters, or having somatic mutations note . So, they are not only rare, but also overlap with the Animal Gender-Bender trope note . Klinefelter mammals are almost always sterile, so tortie cat ones are sterile too. Chimera animals and somatic mutation ones are usually fertile, so male tortie ones are fertile too. Flaky orange gene tortie cats (both male and female, are usually fertile as any other cat. In fiction, however, it's not uncommon to see a male calico or tortoiseshell (and a fertile one at that).
- Solid Cinnamon and Cinnamon Tabby Fur: Cinnamon coloration, both in solid and agouti forms, is uncommon outside of purebred cats and cats in or from Southeast Asia, but animated, graphical, and illustrated works make it look like the patterns are very common across the board. Cinnamon is also the most recessive of the genes on the black/brown locus.
- Patternless Ticked Tabby/Agouti Fur:
- Solid Orange Fur: It's impossible for a cat to have this pattern. Orange cats are always patterned due to the fact they all have the agouti gene. However, their stripes may be extremely faint, making them look solid orange from a distance.
Horses
- Truly White Fur, With Pink Skin: "White" horses are not truly white. They're a diluted grey called grey. Actual white fur requires a mutation that only occurs in the Camarillo White horse (a relatively new breed dating to 1921). The dominant white mutation is also rare, and unlike the aforementioned actual white mutation, it has the caveat of being homozygous lethal. Thus, white horses are much more common in fiction than in reality. Unicorns, pegasi, and magical horses exempt. White Stallion is a trope associated with this.
Western Gorillas
- Dark, Medium, or Light Outright Brown Fur: Fictional Western gorillas will very often be brown, which overlaps with the typical cartoon color of gorillas having outright brown fur. Real life Western Gorillas may be brown in color, or at least have a brown crest on their head, but black and dark grey are far more common.
Specific Examples of Common Rare Colorations:
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Male calico and tortoiseshell cats
Films — Animated
- Mr. Twitches from Tinker Bell and The Great Fairy Rescue is a male calico cat.
- Pig from Dreamworks' Home is a male calico cat, which is a rare in real life as the corkscrew tail that he is named for.
- Mochi from Big Hero 6 is a male calico cat who is said to be a Japanese Bobtail, but appears cobby and fat for one and has a longer tail than what you would expect for one.
- Gonzalo from Puss in Boots: The Three Diablos is a male calico. A bonus point for having a sister, Perla, who has a cream tabby pattern as orange, cream, and (the rare anyway) apricot colors are, although neither rare, let alone improbable on female cats, more common on male cats.
- An American Tail: In the Irish mouse's verse on "There Are No Cats In America", he sings about a calico eating her girlfriend. He sings "he caught us by surprise", but without seeing the attack itself, we can't tell whether it was a male calico or he couldn't' tell which gender it was and assumed it was male.
- There are multiple tortoiseshell tomcats in the Warriors series, including at least one (Redtail) that fathered a kit. Only about one in three thousand tortoiseshells are male, and they're nearly always sterile if they are Klinefelter ones.
- Richard Scarry's character Huckle is a male calico cat, albeit a rather orange dominant with black ears one. His sister is also an orange dominant with black ears calico, but as a female one, she is far more genetically probable and common.
- Bristlejaw from Tailchaser's Song is a male tortoiseshell.
- Cats has a few instances of this. A few male characters, such as the Rum Tum Tugger, Mungojerrie and sometimes Alonzo, are usually portrayed as either calico or tortoiseshell.
Pure-white horses
Video Games
- Red Dead Redemption 2 features a fair number of true white horses, which are quite rare in real life. One such true white horse is a stallion named The Count and who belongs to one of Dutch's gang members.
- Minecraft features a fair number of true white horses, not just a fair number of grey horses (which ostensibly white horses usually are).
Ivory Skin
- The UPA TV cartoons in the 1950s and early 1960s has a tendency to have plenty of human characters and Living Props with a literal ivory white skintone, a type of skintone that is much rarer in real life. These TV cartoons had shoestring budgets, but there are a sizable number of both people with ivory skintones and those with the far more common beige to brown ones.
- Mr. Magoo's houseboy, Charlie from Mr. Magoo combines this with being a Chinese male take on Raven Hair, Ivory Skin. Mr. Magoo, in the same show on the other hand, has the far more common beige skintone.
- Joe Jitsu from The Dick Tracy Show, who is a Japanese man with a literally white skintone. Dick Tracy himself, as well as Go Go Gomez, have far more common skintones.
- Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle:
- Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale are Soviet-like villains from the fictional Pottsylvania who both have a literally white skintone and combine this with Raven Hair, Ivory Skin (albeit Boris is balding).
- These TV cartoons had shoestring budgets, but there are a sizable number of both people with ivory skintones and those with the far more common beige to brown ones.
- The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle continue on the tradition of there being a fair number of people with ivory skintone, most notably Boris and Natasha, alon with people common in real life skintones (beige, pinkish, tan, brown).
- Colleen, the woman in the Donald Duck cartoon "Duck Pimples" combines having an ivory skintone with red hair.
Miscellaneous Types and Work Specific Examples
- Looney Tunes:
- Brown (presumably agouti) Tasmanian devils are the most notable example of this trope from the Looney Tunes franchise and in Tazmania. Taz, his family, the She-Devil, and the average Tasmanian devil in this franchise are all brown when real life Tazzie devils are (solid) black. This contributes to their Informed Species status.
- Phineas and Ferb:
- The typical color for a platypus in this show's universe (especially in the Danville that is this show's main setting) is teal with an orange tail and bill rather than the real life brown with a dark grey bill.
