Fake lipsticks on MM

MM is not so great. Imo. I see so many people advertising lipstick Albinos and sunglows that are definitely not lipsticks. So many new people buy a boa from a person saying the litter is lipstick. So they breed them and call all their babies lipsticks! Such a crap shoot for some who don’t know what true Tom Burke lipsticks look like.

For you new people wanting lipsticks. Research. Check out Toms description of a lipstick. Talk to people who have actually bred true lipsticks. Then look at some of the so called lipsticks on MM. You’ll see most are NOT lipsticks!
I see so many non visuals being called lipstick and yet have no color to hint it’s a lipstick. I’ve asked several “ breeders “ advertising lipsticks for pics of the visual parents or parent. Not once did anyone have a pic of the visual used. Either they sold it ( bs ) or the parents were just a couple hypo het albino ( sold to person as lipstick ) bred to a normal looking SG in which the new breeder tells people they are lipstick.
I do applaud the people using the term lipstick line when appropriate. But I’d still like to see the parent used to create the lipstick line. But for reasons we know, they don’t even post the lipstick parent! Hum

And we won’t get on the corals being sold. I seen a couple “ corals “ posted in 2022. Now being over a year old, where’s the coraling people??
Every coral I’ve owned and bred was coraled up by 1 year. Look at my pics of a few of my corals from years past.

Just because you breed a lipstick or coral to another boa doesn’t mean the babies will all be lipstick or coral!!

I'd love to see Tom Burke's specific description of Lipstick Albinos, but can't seem to find it. Does anyone have a link or care to share the marker checklist? I'm sure it involves lipstick red saddles and facial markings but is there more to it? Is it considered a pastel polygenic/line bred trait? Can you have a Lipstick animal that is not in homozygous Kahl albino format, but a Het? Maybe that's a dumb question, but I've wondered that when seeing "Het Lipstick" instead of "Het Kahl (Lipstick lineage)" ect.

Same goes for Coral. I see there are different lines of Coral. GS, Groovy ect. Is this just another form of polygenic/line bred traits? Or is there something more to Coral than there is to say a pastel line animal? I ask because I see certain pastel lines go through drastic changes as they age, in regards to color. Which has me wondering if Coral is in fact just another pastel line? It seems like the true coral animals are few and far between.

There's no "description" of a Lipstick albino. It's simply a bloodline, which, who knows if the animals OP is describing are descended from Tom's lipstick lineage. I doubt he knows anymore than we do and probably a lot less than the person who bred the animals. High color animals are very difficult to produce and even harder to maintain. I founded the Ferrari pastels and there are many, many animals labeled Ferraris that don't contain near the color that the animals I produced had, but if they came from my bloodline, they have every right to label them Ferraris. It's just how that works.

Searching 'lipstick' on his FB confirms that he takes this to be a selectively bred albino line, not necessarily a morph of its own or a specific set of traits. The selective breeding bit is as important in these sorts of cases as is the lineage, though.

But there are plenty of ads out there that are using 'Lipstick' as a purported morph name, rather than an indicator of the (partial) lineage of the animal. Some of these are on het animals, which makes no sense since Lipstick has a line bred component.

Being a lineage, the hets are just as much "Lipsticks" as the albinos/sunglows/etc. I get that there are probably a lot of people out there working with the Lipstick line that don't quite understand how selective breeding works and thus the wording of their advertising is probably sloppy. If more people understood and participated in selective breeding, there'd be much higher quality and much less quantity of animals being produced, but again, none of that really has anything to do with whether those animals genetics originated with Tom's Lipstick animals. If they did, they're Lipsticks. If not and it can be proven (it likely can't at this point, honestly) then we're just whining at the wind.

Edit for the ending of my last post: If it can be proven that someone's stock didn't originate with Tom, then they should be called out. If it can't, then we're just whining in the wind.

Originally Posted by JCCS

Being a lineage, the hets are just as much "Lipsticks" as the albinos/sunglows/etc.

Hmm.

A 'het for Y' is an animal that carries (with some degree of certainty, up to 100%) one copy of the gene 'Y'. There's some slop with this, since keepers seem to mostly accept that an animal can be 'het for snow' where snow is the combination of albino and anerythristic; in this case, 'het for Y' entails that 'Y' is two genes that the animal carries one copy of each.

An 'X line' animal is such in virtue of one or (preferably, IMO) both of its parents being 'X line' animals. Usually (and in the case we're discussing here), 'being an X line' derives from the animal's progenitors having been part of a project of some (famous) breeder.

If I breed two 'X line' animals together, the offspring would be 'X line'. If I breed a generic animal to an 'X line' animal, I may or may not be justified in claiming that the F1s are 'X line' (personally, I'd say they're 'X-line' x generic). But what these 'X line x generic' animals are not is 'het for X line', since lineage isn't a single locus gene, but rather is a history and whatever polygenic traits that the animal acquired during that history.

Consider '50% het for X', which makes sense but '50% chance that a progenitor of this animal passed through the hands of breeder B' does not, at least not in the same way.

Because Lipstick is a line, and because a line isn't a gene, there aren't any 'het for Lipstick' animals (although there may be het Kahl albino animals with some Lipstick lineage in their makeup).

Thanks for clarifying that JCCS. It makes sense if it's just a lineage name with no real markers. Then technically I guess all those "het lipstick albino" should be "lipstick het albino".

Those Ferrari Pastels are insane, great work.
Question if you don't mind? If a Ferrari was outcrossed and gave a varying litter in regards to color, reduction of black pigment ect - would you consider the whole litter Ferrari Pastels just different grades of quality? Or would the high color/clean individuals be labeled Ferrari Pastels and dirtier less colorful looking animals be labeled "Ferrari line"?

I was doing research on pastel lines on FB and found posts suggesting pastels need to meet a certain set of markers - reduced black pigment/freckling, washed out side medallions and overall clean appearance - in order to be labeled pastels. That's what sparked the question above. I understand Ferrari would be the lineage but am curious how you'd label the other animals.

*curious how you'd label the other animals- by that I mean the ones that don't meet your standards of Ferrari Pastels*

Hi Matthew. I would consider them all Ferrari line animals of differing quality. Pastels are a whole different thing. Hopefully, Ferrari lineage litters will produce pastels, but even the best Ferrari litters have animals that don't qualify as pastel, even if they have extreme color. Pastel is all about reduction of black.