page_title: Lavender (chicken plumage)
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Lavender (chicken plumage) / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: Pekin bantam female. Русский: Курица пекинской бентамки.
context_page_description: Lavender or self-blue refers to a plumage color pattern in the chicken characterized by a uniform, pale bluish grey color across all feathers. The distinctive color is caused by the action of an autosomal recessive gene, commonly designated as "lav", which reduces the expression of eumelanin and phaeomelanin so that black areas of the plumage appear pale grey instead, and red areas appear a pale buff.
context_section_description: The "lavender" gene (lav) in the chicken causes the dilution of both black (eumelanin) and red/brown (phaeomelanin) pigments, so according to color background, dilution due to "lavender" gives a sort of plumage color patterns: On an extended black background, this condition causes the entire surface of the body an even shade of light slaty blue, which is the typical phenotype known as '"self-blue"'.
  On a red/brown color plumage background, lavender gene degrades color to beige, like in some Pekin Bantams as in the picture set aside. On the color background of the Belgian Bearded d'Uccle Bantams, frequently referred to as the "Mille Fleur" in the United States, lavender causes the pattern known as "porcelain". The resulting "porcelain" pattern is beige with each feather tipped with a V-shaped of slaty blue near the end of the feather and the feather tipped with a V-shaped white spangle.
  Light and electron microscope studies have revealed that, although lavender melanocytes possess relatively normal dendrite morphology, there is defective peripheral accumulation of melanosomes to the dendrites. This results in the patchy transfer of melanosomes into the keratinocytes of the growing feather. The dilution effect is essentially the result of a mixture of pigmented and unpigmented regions within the feather barbs.
caption: Pekin Bantam hen exhibiting the effect of lavender on a red plumage background
exif: {}