Choosing a Collar Color for Your Dog

Choosing collar color that looks good on your dog can be tough, and even tougher when you have as many choices as there is in dog collars today. So what collar color should you choose for your dog? Keep in mind that colors that appeal to you may not look as good on your dog, so you’ll want to choose a color that will compliment your dogs coat.

There’s 2 simple rules that will guide you in selecting a collar color that is just right for your dogs coat.

Rule 1: Think Temperature. Does Your Dog Have a Warm Coat or a Cool Coat?

Colors can be divided into cool, warm and neutral categories. Blues, purples and greens are considered cool colors. Reds, browns, and tan are warm colors. Black, white and grey are neutral. Your dog’s coat color will fall into either the warm or neutral color category. Once you determine the temperature in terms of cool or warm,  shop for opposites in your dogs coat temperature. For example, if your dog’s coat is a warm color like brown or red, shop for cool colors, like blue or green. Other warm colored coats would be tan, chocolate, and buff. If your dog’s coat is black, then you are a lucky one. There’s not too many colors a black-coated dog can’t wear.  If you have a white dog, you have as many choices as you do with a black dog. Grey is neutral – you can go warm or cool with a grey dog, but you should pick something with contrast, which takes us to rule #2.

Rule 2. Does Your Dog Have a Light Coat, or a Dark Coat?

Think about lightness and darkness, and choose a color collar that is the opposite of your dogs coat. If your dog has a dark coat, then shop for lighter color collars. If your dog has a light coat, go with a darker color collar. For example, if your dogs coat is a dark brown, even though navy is a cool color, it’s dark, and won’t stand out as much as a royal or light blue collar would. If your has a buff coat, lilac or pastel blue isn’t going to be very complimentary either. However bright bold cool colors (royal blue, emerald green) will look good on both light or dark coats. If your has a cool dark coat, don’t go with chocolate brown or maroon – find a nice light or bright red or pink.

Due to many requests, we’ve added a couple of pictures of a white dog and a dark grey dog that are good examples of complimentary colors. The white poodle (Oki) can wear anything, but her owners choice of our Teal Damask is great because it has a bit of off-white in the design, making it look great! And the grey poodle looks super in red – what a stand out!

In spite of all this advice, you should still select something you like – after all, if you like it, your dog will like it too! The Artful Canine has a great selection of collars and colors to suit almost any dogs coat color, whether it be a boy or girl. For more examples of different dog coat colors and complimentary collars, check out our Irish Dogs and Collars post.

Teal on Oki’s white coat is perfect!

Tak looks great in Red!

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