In your experience with doodles growing up...

[Jen and Annie]

So I've seen black doodles turning silver, and chocolate doodles also going silver or a cafe au lait color.  This seems pretty common among the darker doodles.

But I am seeing a good number of pure white hairs on Annie, which is weird because she has always been pretty darn red.  Her face IS very slightly lighter than when we first got her, but more like a sunkissed blonde color in her beard and ears, but overall she is still a reddish apricot. 

There are a LOT of white hairs on her chest, but I couldn't get a good picture from there, the picture below is from her hip area.  These hairs are all over, are they a sign of things to come?  These are very new additions, I would say within the past 3-4 days?  She is almost 6 months old.

I named her Annie for a reason... so am I going to have to change her name to Betty White?   

This area, her side, doesn't have as many as her chest does but this is what they look like::

 

[Jen and Annie]

Yeah, I see that Hattie did get a pinch lighter from her puppyhood.  Maybe those are just Annies 'highlights' coming in... Arent they supposed to shed their puppy coat at some point?  Maybe these white hairs are adult hair coming in... they seem thicker than the rest of her hair too. 

[BG and Gavin]

What a cute picture of Hattie!

[Willow and J]

My Willow is a cross between parti (black-white) poodle and red golden and she used to be darker and we could see white patches at the tip of her tail and on her toes, as well as a "blaze" on her forehead. She's gotten lighter overall, and all those white markings were gone by 10 months or so. Her ears stayed darker than the rest of the body, and that's pretty much how it stayed.

[Amy, Cubbie & Ollie]

we adopted Ollie from DRC when he was almost 2 years old. He is a cream/apricot color with dark coloring on his ears, around his eyes and mouth and along his back.  The paperwork that his former owners gave us shows that their breeder listed him as red and the puppy picture shows a red puppy.  He is no where near red now but since we didn't get him until later, I don't know when his coat lightened.  So it is possible for a red to end up more of an apricot

[Ricki and Tara (doodle)]

Tara was a dark apricot when she was a baby but started to get white hair mixed in at about the same age as Annie. After her adult coat came in she still had the white hair mixed in. Her coloring now (3 years) is medium apricot on her head but it fades the further down her body you go. By the time you get to her tail she is very  light apricot!

I think with the colored doodles it is often a surprise when the adult coat grows in so it's hard to predict! I don't think you will need to change her name to Betty though! :)

This pic shows Tara's fading pretty well. In many of her pics she appears to be a little brown dog but in "real" life she is quite orange and we almost always get comments about her unusual color when she is out and about. Maybe I need to upgrade my technology!

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

A lot of reds do fade to apricot, and a lot of apricots do fade to a paler color. The faces in particular often get a lot lighter and the white hairs become more prominent. With poodles, it's very rare for reds in particular to stay deep red in adulthood.

JD's face has gotten much lighter as he's gotten older. He's always had a lot of white mixed through his coat, but in the last year or so, there's a lot more.

[Ricki and Tara (doodle)]

Looks like Tara faded in reverse! Does that mean she doesn't know her head from her ??? LOL!

[Adina P]

Our black F1 labradoodle has a lot of white hairs sprinkled through her coat.  She is not turning silver, she just has white sprinkles.

Sorry this is sideways but you can see the white sprinkles on her back very well

[Jen and Annie]

On my phone, the pic shows right side up! So smart, this phone...

[F, Calla & Luca]

Are these hairs coarser than the others? They could be kemp. There are discussions on this.

[Jen and Annie]

They seem shorter than the rest, but her hair is pretty wiry, so I would say about the same. She still has some puppy fluff going on, so the white hairs are coarser than those. I will look into "kemp"

[J and Riley (and Luna)]

Are they a LOT shorter than the rest?

Luna grows a pure white undercoat each Winter underneath her red/apricot coat.