Traits
(STY_) sooty (Natural)
Name: Sooty
Base Genotype: STY_
Skin Color: Dark
Eyes: Brown
Description: Sooty affects all base coats and darkens the coat starting along the back and topline. Sooty has a wide range of expression and may range from barely being noticable at all, to covering a large portion of the body and causing strong dappling on the horses neck, shoulders, and sides. Even on lighter coats like champagne or cream, some darkening of the coat will occur. On bay horses, the sooty areas tend to be black. On black horses, sooty is not able to be seen.
Design Guidance: Sooty should be a blended out gradient without hard edges, with the strongest darkening being along the horse's topline. At minimum, sooty can very slightly darken the spine of the horse. At maximum, the sooty can darken the entire body of the horse and blend out down the legs. Sooty does not make horses solid black, or solidly darkened- it should be a gradient. Sooty does not have any impact on white markings such as tobiano or sabino, as sooty occurs below these markings. Sooty dapples are optional.
On light diluted coats, be sure to only darken the coat, rather than using black to blacken it. Here we have a sooty pearl horse where the pearl coat is darkened by sooty:
