The Horse Colors Site

Sooty, occasionally called Smutty, or Countershading, Coloring

This term refers to a layer of black or other dark hairs which appears to be "overlaid" on the base color, typically over the center line of the back, the hips, the shoulders and sometimes other parts of body, and may include the mane and tail.  It can be highly variable from just a dusting of black hairs over the wither area, to an extreme amount nearly covering the entire horse.  Some horses show a dorsal stripe and no other sootiness - it is thought to be a different variation of the same thing, but nobody really knows yet if they have the same cause or are entirely different.  It has also been hotly debated whether or not sootiness actually adds black hairs to a red-based color, i.e. chestnut or palomino.  The hairs appear to be black, but the argument goes that since a red-based horse is "ee", which blocks production of black pigment leaving only red, then there could be no black hairs made, and therefore they must be very dark red that just looks black.  Others feel that the sooty gene may cancel out the black-pigment-blocking effect of "ee" and allow the sooty hairs to be, in fact, black.  The presence of black-looking sooty hairs on a palomino would suggest that this may be the case, since if they were some shade of red they would be diluted to yellow by the Cream gene, which does not dilute black pigment when heterozygous.  Until the actual sooty gene is found and studied, we simply do not know exactly how it works or how it is inherited.  It does seem to be readily passed on so is likely dominant to some degree at least.

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