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Varnish is a hidden gene causes appy horses to get white hairs in their coats with age. They will progressively get lighter with age, though the rate varies per horse. Snowflake is a different hidden gene that only interacts with appy. This causes the small white spots over the entire coat of the horse. Size and density vary by horse. In game it needs 2 copies of snowflake and at least one copy of appy to show.

There is no such thing as a nonvarnishing snowflake. Snowflake IS varnish.

Sorry for sounding confusing. I'm kind of confused lol.

I'm fairly certain you are writing what you're asking, the first two answers you got were either wrong or misleading.

Lp is appaloosa, PATN controls blanket size, and varnish controls the speed and type of lightening with age that happens. That lightening is varnish, it's called varnish, that is literally what the word 'varnish' means, and that's what the gene is named after. The varnish genes don't effect anything but how the coat varnishes out- lightens with age. What the horse looks like before varnish acts on the coat is controlled by the other two- lp makes them appy at all, homozygous lp makes them 'snowcaps', appies with solid white marks and no spots. PATN1 makes bigger blankets. What varnish genes the horse has has no impact on that 'base'.

There are three varnish genes- varnish, 'no' varnish, and snowflake.
Snowflake means that the varnish is concentrating in spots that grow and increase as the horse ages rather than being evenly spread through the coat, which looks like snowflakes. So no, there is absolutely no way to breed a snowflake that doesn't varnish. Snowflake is varnish. If anything, snowflake is faster acting varnish.

Regular, non-snowflake varnish is what you're thinking of when you say appies lighten with age, that's what you're seeing.

'No' varnish significantly slows the rate that the horse varnishes out. I don't think it actually stops it, that's why I put 'no' in marks like that, but it slows it a lot. So you can breed for horses that fade out much slower, but not, to my knowledge, ones that don't fade at all. No, this does not effect their appy markings in the first place or make them not show- to the contrary it makes them stay visible longer.

The varnish locus is hidden, and we have somewhat limited knowledge- we know snowflake is completely recessive, but last I heard as far as the other two we're not fully sure whether they're codominant or incomplete dominance or what's going on there. I could be out of date (or just wrong, lol) on this though.

So the horse Gilded posted does in fact have varnish, because it has snowflake, which is a spotty and speedy type of varnish. And the second answer you got says that snowflake and varnish are two different hidden genes, this isn't correct. They're two alleles of the same hidden locus, two possible versions of the varnish gene.

Make sense?

Haha good, you're welcome