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Black Horse Color

Black Horse

Thanks to the classic “Black Beauty,” the black horse color is quite easy to remember. Horses of this shade are relatively rare however. You can only call the animal technically “black” if its entire coat is the shade of midnight.

These equine breeds are known for their black coat:
Black Beauties
1Alt-Oldenburger
2Ariegeois (also known as Merens)
3Dales pony
4Fell pony
5Friesian
6Groningen
7Kladruber
8Murgese
9Ostfriesen


There are some horses that “look” black but really aren’t. Just check again! If you spot some brownish or reddish hairs in some parts of the body, perhaps you’ve mistaken black horse color for dark bay or dark chestnut.

The genuinely black horse is dark-skinned, brown-eyed and black from head to hooves. The only exception is when the body has tufts of white hair. You can expect the skin under such white horse hairs to be pinkish. When the white marks cover the eye area, a true black horse can be blue-eyed. Fascinating!Lovely as it is, black horse color can either stay richly dark (or “sheer”) or get sun bleached. The latter look is “faded,” and this may be due to sweat, sun exposure and other outside elements.

  • True Black

    • Don’t let patterns, white markings and pinkish underskin confuse you! A horse’s base color has little to do with these details. Instead, here’s what you can expect true black horses to exhibit.

  • Young Ones

    • The young ones (foals) are usually born with mousy gray hair. All of them are born with dark skin and dark eyes. A lot of them have markings that eventually fade during adulthood. For this reason, you may easily confuse a black foal with a bay dun or a grullo.

    Now, if you see a foal born with a super black coat, you can’t expect the horse coat color to stay that way. Such foal could grow up to be a gray adult – especially if one of its parents is a gray horse. An example is the Gray Lipizzaner, a gray horse born with a black coat. To check if a black foal may turn gray, look for white hairs growing around its muzzle and eye areas.

  • Adults

    • Identifying if an adult horse is indeed a true black horse is less tricky. You see, you only have to check if the animal’s coat is entirely black (with or without sun bleaching). The sun-bleached areas are of course the lighter shade and may sometimes look “rusty” or “smoky.” So, which parts of a horse’s body get bleached mostly? The answer sounds like a shampoo brand: mane and tail!

  • Almost Black But Not Quite

    • How keen is your eye sight? There are quite a number of very dark shades that people – even the most avid horse lovers – often mistake for black. Where ordinary observation isn’t enough, a DNA test can tell you if the color you’re seeing is the genuine thing or not. Here are three of the trickiest shades mimicking the black horse color:

  • Dark Bay

    • Because the horse coat is so dark, you may miss the reddish or chocolaty hairs in the muzzle, eye, stifle and armpit areas. Dark bay variations include seal brown, black bay and mahogany.

  • Black Chestnut

    • As with dark bay, the chestnut shade can be so dark that you can rarely make out the rich red undertones. A DNA test should tell you that a dark liver chestnut horse coat has no black pigments at all!

  • Smoky Black

    • A horse coat of this shade indicates that at least one of the parents is a cream horse. However, because the cream gene has little effect on black, you may expect a smoky black horse to sport the same dark skin of a true black horse. A typical smoky black horse has a pair of lovely blue eyes and some reddish hairs in its inner ears.

Black and White Paint Horse

Paint horses can sport all of these shades along with white to make up unique paint horse coat colors and patterns.

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