I agree, the face color is too dense for ermine. This is a Himalayan pointed white (left) compared to ermine (right):
The ermine tipping isn't as dark as your rabbit's nose, and the coat is much lighter, a pearl white. When I look at your photos, I was wondering about the color near the face:
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Is this due to shadows in the photo, or is the new coat coming in darker than the old coat? It definitely doesn't look ermine white, looks more pale fawn (cream). This is a fascinating puzzle. I looked at the buck's face:
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I see what looks like some white hairs on the right side of his nose, but no agouti markings, no eye rings or white around the nose. But I do see what looks like fawn coloration to the left of the eye. This would be odd, as a rabbit with a dark nose and no agouti markings would be a recessive self non-agouti, as is the black tort. Breeding two non-agouti rabbits can't make an agouti patterned chinchilla (as chin is just regular agouti with the c(chd) gene instead of full-color C.)
So, something else is going on here. A pearl is just a tortoiseshell (a non-agouti rabbit with the recessive ee extension gene that turns on the yellow pigment), plus the chinchilla c(chd) gene, which removes yellow. So where the coat is normally yellowish, it becomes pearl white. If the buck was a pearl, he couldn't throw chinchilla kits, as the chinchilla patterning only works on agouti rabbits. Non-agouti chins look exactly like their full-color self rabbits, either black, blue, chocolate or lilac--the only exception is the tortoiseshell that becomes pearl.
So, if he isn't a tort, and he isn't a pearl, what is he? There is one thing I can think of--when you remove your Angora's coat, are there any dark markings anywhere else on the body? Or any light markings where the points are, which would normally be all dark (ears, legs, tail)? Could you take a photo showing the belly and legs? If so, the answer may be the elusive harlequin. Harlequin works in both agouti and non-agouti, moving the dark and light patches around on the body. Some rabbits with harlequin have minimal dark, looking like normal fawns (or pearls if they have the chinchilla gene.)
A harlequin agouti can look like a 'normal' rabbit, but often with the color just seeming a bit 'off', hard to describe, just a feeling something is different that you can't quite put your finger on. Harlequin colors in the agouti markings, so you can't tell by that. Before raising harlequins, I wouldn't have even considered such a thing, but I've seen first hand how the gene can affect color. What other colors did you get in the litter with the black tort?
@Alaska Satin, any thoughts?
