If it feels like orange kittens are suddenly everywhere—from TikTok videos to neighborhood adoption events—you are not imagining it. But the biggest reason they're making headlines isn't because they're funnier, friendlier, or more mischievous than other cats. It's because scientists recently solved one of the longest-running mysteries in feline genetics.
For more than 100 years, researchers knew that most orange cats were male but couldn't explain exactly why. That changed in May 2025, when independent research teams at Stanford University in the United States and Kyushu University in Japan identified the genetic change responsible for orange coat color. Their findings, published simultaneously in Current Biology , revealed that a mutation affecting the ARHGAP36 gene on the X chromosome switches pigment production from dark eumelanin to orange pheomelanin.
