I'm lost again

[Silverine]

TL;DR: She's Silver Amber Pearl (bay + silver + champagne + 2x pearl). Feel free to just take my word for it if you don't want to bother with the below.

So this one is a bit more difficult. The sire appears to be a Silver Buckskin Pearl (bay + silver + pearl/cream). The mother appears to be an Amber Champagne (bay + champagne). But, to me, the horse in question absolutely screams "PEARL" even at first glance. And looking at the dam's pedigree, I'm fairly certain she's carrying a hidden pearl.

Your horse definitely has freckles, so clearly champagne is at play. So I think our first step should be to look at your guess of Silver Classic Champagne (black + silver + champange). For reference, here are my saved images of Silver Classic Champagne (this one also has roan, but we can ignore that since it doesn't change the base shade):





So your horse has a decidedly different base tone than my example horse. She is also considerably darker. It seems safe to nix this possibility.

But where to go from here? We're keeping champagne because of the freckles. It seems a safe bet to assume silver since dad has it and your horse's mane and tail are so bright. What if we look at Silver Classic Pearl (black + silver + champagne + 2x pearl)? My saved example images of that color look like this:




Once again the base shade is wrong and this horse is even lighter than the previous one! So that wasn't the correct direction.

So then what if we took out the silver and looked at just Classic Pearl (black + champagne + 2x pearl)? My example horse for that looks like this (just ignore the tobi spots):





Once again, your horse is too dark and the mane and tail of the example horse aren't nearly bright enough.

Okay. Now I'm stumped.

Back to the drawing board. What if we're wrong about the black base? Your horse does not have dapples. While there can be blacks with the silver dapple gene that don't show dapples on their body, it's pretty rare. Especially on a coat that dark. Let's also take a look at your horse's foal picture:



There is a dark spot on her muzzle within the foal pangare that I find is usually reserved for bay-based horses. (Not the dark spot itself, but just a certain way that the dark spot is that looks somehow different from on black bases. It's weird, I know. Don't question my methods! ) There's also the fact that both of the horse's parents are bay based. That doesn't mean they can't throw black, it just makes it less likely.

So what if she is bay-based, and not black-based? That brings me to the possibility of Silver Amber Pearl (bay + silver + champagne + 2x pearl). The one saved in my examples looks like this:




Ding ding ding! Looks like we have a winner. So I'm placing my money on Silver Amber Pearl.

[Silverine]

Sunpath is correct. Genetically, a Palomino is a red-based (chestnut/sorrel) horse with a single cream gene. A Grey horse is a horse of any base color with the Grey gene. You can have a palomino that is going grey but that horse is still Grey.

Grey is also dominant. It does not hide. You can not have a grey foal from non-grey parents. Grey horses are born with a colored coat and go grey as they age. They are not born white.

For reference, here is a very pretty Palomino boy, and here is a lovely example of a Grey horse on a palomino base. Both even have pictures in their galleries to show their progression.

Some further education:

Your horse, Financial Mi$$take is a grey. She was born with an adult-looking bay coat and is now in her flea-bitten stage. If you go back through her pedigree you will find that she has a grey parent (her mother), that parent has a grey parent (her father), and so on all the way back to whichever AC horse the grey originally came from. (There's no picture of them now, but the source in her particular bloodline happens to be this horse.)

Some people do mistake other genes for grey - especially the leopard complex (appaloosa spotting). For example, your horse Intuit is not grey. She is a chestnut tobiano with a single copy of the leopard spotting gene that is causing her to varnish as she ages. All of the horses on her mother's side are the same. None of them are grey.

If you would like to know what color Sunpath's horse actually was, I posted about that above.

[Sunpath]

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Thank you SO much for taking the time to write that long reply! I just cannot manage to wrap my head around champagne and pearl. I have such a hard time actually telling visually if a horse has champagne or not. I tried looking at the various images in the pinned threads here on the forum but it's really difficult when there are a ton of dilutions at play. Doesn't help that champagne and pearl really doesn't exist in my part of the world either so I've never seen a horse with those dilutions in real life.

I've saved your images as well. I probably have a ton of her ancestors marked down as the wrong colour too. Back to the drawing board I guess.

[Silverine]

It doesn't help that silver + champagne + pearl can interact in some weird ways! The first time I got a silver amber pearl I was completely flummoxed as to what its color was. And they come in different shades!

One of my example horses. I didn't realize this guy had dun for the longest time.



Another example horse. This one also has roan.




And a foal picture from another example horse. Another dun that went unnoticed for quite a while.


So I couldn't use any of those guys to compare to yours because dun messes with the base shade. I had to look way back in my records to find one that looked the same. *' dun messing with my examples.

[Sunpath]

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I'm going to save those examples as well for the future!

I so wish there was genetic testing in the game, would make my HWO life so much easier hah

[Silverine]

If you're interested, I keep all of my examples in this dropbox folder. Just fair warning that some of the foal pics may be mislabeled if I missed a dun or roan when they were babies and haven't changed it yet.