Wondering why our hair looks a little messy? We promise we’re not having a bad hair day! Our unstructured curls and curly whiskers are as natural as they are adorable. Our curls are most prominent on our flanks, belly, and around our necks. If you’re wondering where they came from, our curls resulted from a happy cross-breeding accident between a Persian cat and a British Shorthair house cat.

While many cats are bred intentionally for their looks, my curls appeared naturally. At an animal shelter in Montana in 1987, a feral blue Tortoiseshell cat and a white British Shorthair house cat met, and the house cat gave birth to one strange-looking kitten in a litter of five. The kitten had curly hair and whiskers, and it wasn't long before she caught the attention of a Persian breeder, Jeri Newman. Jeri named the curly kitten Miss DePesto, because she was always pestering Jeri for more love. Jeri did some research and found out that Miss Depesto's mixed-breed mother also had hair that slightly varied in texture. But Miss Depesto's hair was remarkable in that her whiskers were curly, she had matted hair in her ears, and there were waves of hair all over her body. Miss Depesto also had prominent cheeks, and a wide flat spot between her ears. Similar to a Cornish Rex, her body was heavy, but her legs were long. Because all of Miss Depesto's siblings had normal coats, and because there were no other curly cats in the area, Jeri decided that Miss Depesto might be carrying a new gene. Jeri bred Miss Depesto with a black Persian male cat, and of the six kittens born, three had curly hair. It was a dominant gene! The Selkirk Rex gene, that is. Not long after that, in 1999, the International Cat Association accepted us into their New Breed Program. We were the talk of the town at the championship competition, and we've been winning humans' hearts ever since.