Porcelain Chicken Genetics · Chicken Color Standards

Porcelain is one of the prettiest results in bantam colour genetics, and one of the simplest to describe once you know mille fleur: it is mille fleur with the lavender gene added. Lavender softens every colour — the gold becomes cream, the black becomes a pale blue-grey, and the white stays white — for the pastel "porcelaine" look (porselein in Dutch, a common hobby name). For the wider system, see the Genetics Guide.

Close-up of porcelain plumage: cream feathers with soft blue-grey scalloped lacing. — Porcelain up close — the same three-part feather as mille fleur, softened by lavender to cream and blue-grey.

Two porcelain chicks held in a hand, with gold-brown and cream down. — Porcelain chicks — the lavender dilution softens the down from the start.

Close-up of a porcelain chick with soft brown-and-cream mottled down. — A closer look at the same soft, low-contrast down pattern.

Porcelain chick with a warm brown head and cream body, held indoors. — Another porcelain chick, showing the same warm-brown-over-cream down.

How it's built: mille fleur + lavender

Start from the mille fleur genotype — a brown base spangled with black by the Pattern and Melanotic genes and tipped white by mottling¹ — and add two copies of recessive lavender. The full genotype is e^b/e^b · Db/Db · Pg/Pg · Ml/Ml · mo/mo · lav/lav:

Component	Genotype	Effect
Mille fleur base	`e^b/e^b · Db/Db · Pg/Pg · Ml/Ml · mo/mo`	The tricolour: gold ground, black spangle, white tip.
Lavender	`lav/lav`	Dilutes both pigments — gold → cream, black → blue-grey; white is unaffected.²

The result is the same three-part feather as mille fleur, only in pastel: cream where the bird would have been gold, soft blue-grey where it would have been black, and unchanged white at the tip. Lavender is a recessive dilution of both pigments — the same gene behind self-blue birds — which is why it lightens the warm and the dark tones together.

How it breeds

Porcelain stacks two recessive requirements — mo/mo (from mille fleur) and lav/lav — so a porcelain bird must be homozygous for both. That shapes how it behaves in the pen:

Porcelain × porcelain breeds true — both parents supply mo/mo and lav/lav.
Porcelain × mille fleur gives an entire F1 that looks like mille fleur: every chick inherits one lavender allele but also a normal one, so the lavender is carried, hidden. Porcelain reappears in about a quarter of the F2, when two lavender carriers are bred together — exactly the disappearing act described on the lavender page.

Why porcelain projects take a generation longer than they look. Because lavender is recessive, crossing porcelain to anything non-lavender hides it for a generation. Any project that adds or removes lavender should be planned to the F2 — the Breeding Outcomes tool will show the 25% reappearance directly.

Telling it apart from mille fleur

The two are the same pattern at different saturations, so the tell is simply intensity: mille fleur reads as gold-black-white with strong contrast; porcelain reads as cream-grey-white, soft and low-contrast. If the "black" crescents look blue-grey and the ground looks like milky cream rather than gold, lavender is present and you are looking at porcelain. The same logic applied to a plain gold/partridge base — lavender without the mille-fleur pattern — gives isabel.

A note on the name. In the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, hobbyists commonly use "porcelain" (Dutch: porcelein) more loosely, as a catch-all for any mottled bird regardless of base colour — not only this specific lavender-plus-millefleur genotype. See Mottling genetics for the gene behind that broader, informal usage.

References

Somes RG Jr (1980) The mottling gene, the basis of six plumage color patterns in the domestic fowl. Poultry Science 59(7):1370–1374 — the recessive mottling gene (mo) shared by mille fleur, porcelain and related patterns.
Vaez M et al. (2008) A single point-mutation within the melanophilin (MLPH) gene causes the lavender plumage colour dilution phenotype in the chicken. BMC Genetics 9:7 — the recessive lavender dilution of both pigments.

Try it: plan a porcelain cross · see mille fleur · how lavender works