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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today announced that the Hephaestus Group has closed final trials on a twenty-seven-strong claw pigment set for the four commercial Morphic templates offered under the Phenotype Renovations™ service line. Previously, the corporation's Morphic Wolf, Otter, Vulpine, and Feline designs delivered a single milky-cream keratin pigmentation as the only available finish; the new pigment set covers twenty-seven shades and opacities and will be included in the base specification of every newly-commissioned Morphic design from the first of July 2026.

The pigment set was developed over a four-year period by the Hephaestus Group's Keratin Programme — a small, long-horizon research group that has, since 2019, been rebuilding the corporation's understanding of the mammalian claw and nail from the transcription factor upward. The programme's final structured-follow-up cohort was closed in April 2026; the twenty-seven shades released today are the ones the Independent Ethics Board found supported by that follow-up evidence.

“A claw is the only part of a Morphic design that a client sees, close up, every day for the rest of their life. That the corporation was, for two decades, comfortable delivering all four templates in a single colour is a matter of considerable ongoing embarrassment to those of us who worked on the original pipeline. The point of the twenty-seven shades is not, in the end, twenty-seven: it is that the client is offered a real aesthetic choice at the point at which the design is agreed, and that the choice will still be theirs in thirty years' time.”

— Dr. Ines Marchetti-Roux, Chief Scientific Officer

What the new set covers

• Twenty-seven shades across six chromatic bands. The palette includes the original milky-cream and its warm variants; the deep-neutral band ranging through greys to obsidian black; two amber bands developed on the Vulpine reference; a cool-blue band newly available on Otter and Feline; and a translucent band that permits the vasculature of the nail-bed to remain visible at the tip. Band VI (Translucent) is achieved by attenuation of melanosome deposition in the claw-bed matrix, not by pigment substitution.
• Ten opacity levels per shade. Independent selection of finish opacity, from the fully translucent through six degrees of matte to a high-gloss finish stable under standard grooming. Opacity is governed by melanosome packing density and the crystallinity of the outer keratin layer.
• Persistence through future growth. The pigment set is introduced by base editing at the claw-bed matrix keratinocyte lineage, with heritability confirmed by long-read sequencing at the eight-week follow-up. The pigment is therefore retained through the entire natural claw-growth cycle. The original 2015 pipeline required semi-annual reapplication of the base cream; the new set requires none.
• Full compatibility with the four commercial Morphic templates. Every shade is available on Wolf, Otter, Vulpine, and Feline. The Morphic X custom line will receive full palette support in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to individual design review.

The palette

The set is organised in six chromatic bands. Shade and opacity are specified independently at design consultation, and band positions across the four claws are elective. Final expression on the delivered claw is a composite of the pigment specification and adjacent design elements: co-selected coat eumelanin loci, claw-plate keratin lamellar spacing, and (in a small fraction of Feline and Otter recipients) the residual influence of the client's founder allele at TYRP1. Band V (Cool Blue) is a structural finish rather than a true pigment; its hue derives from Rayleigh scattering through the keratin matrix and is therefore the band most sensitive to compounding design choices elsewhere in the specification. The Hephaestus Group will flag any at-risk pairing at consultation.

I Cream II Deep III Honey IV Resin V Blue VI Sheer

Existing clients

For clients who have already received a Morphic design under the pre-2026 pigment specification, the corporation will make a claw-repigmentation follow-up procedure available beginning in October 2026, on the corporation's standard follow-up terms. Details will be sent by the Office of Client Services to affected clients directly over the summer; enquiries may be directed there in the interim.

No change to safety register terms

The pigment set falls within the existing Phenotype Renovations safety register and does not open a new register class. Adverse-event surveillance for the new shades will be reported alongside the parent template in the corporation's annual safety disclosures.

Enquiries from institutional partners and regulators may be directed to the Office of the General Counsel, 15 Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar.