So the story...
My daughter's science teacher (6th grade) has a classroom corn snake that goes on field trips to kids homes over the weekends. When it came to visit our home, I started researching into corns out of curiosity. I was surprised by the large variety of patterns and colors! I jokingly asked my daughter to "pick a color you think corn snakes can't be". She said: "I don't know...purple?" I chuckled and said "you can get lavender ones!" and showed her some obviously doctored pictures of pure purple snakes! Then I showed her what I thought were more realistic photos from what looked like reputable breeder's sites...most of those looked more dark brown/grey than purple to us.
A month or so latter we starting thinking about Christmas gifts and the idea of a corn snake came up. We're good pet owners having owned just about every pet imaginable (cats, salt/freshwater fish, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats, iguanas, cockatiels, etc...) we do our homework and take care of our pets and most have lived long seemingly happy lifetimes.
We found a mom & pop pet store that's a bit of a ways from us but looked like they cared for their animals and do deal in numerous types of snakes and reptiles. My wife and I figured we just pick from whatever they had assuming it looked healthy and decent tempered...we don't really care about morphs and such. Once a pet is yours and you start to take care of it it's the most special one in the world no matter how it looks
Turns out they were all out of corns the day we shopped there. We were OK with that since Christmas was still a month away and it meant we wouldn't have to hide a snake for a few weeks! The lady working with us said they were placing a new order the following Monday and they'd call us when the new snakes arrived. Thinking it would make my daughter smile to own a "purple" snake...I asked that if they were ordering anyway, any chance they could order a Lavender? The lady working with us made a few calls and said yep...she could get us a lavender
My wife brought it home a few days before Christmas. I was expecting something with dark brown/grey patches and pink/white stripes since that's what most of the lavender baby picks I had seen looked like. What she brought home was very pale. Definitely pink, but the pattern was subtle and nothing like the stark patterns I had seen pictured. Now that Sal is older there are points in his shed cycle where he almost looks pure white with his patterning very hard to see. Post shed he tends to look pinker with higher contrast patches.
Using Ians Vivarium's descriptions Shiari's description seems to fit if I understand things right. Motley causes the lack of checkerboard on his belly and the way his blotches merge so that he has light blotches in the front but dark blotches in the back (a feature my daughter and I really like!). Lavender provides the pinkish/greyish coloration. I guess I just expected lavender babies to look more like what's pictured here
http://iansvivarium.com/morphs/lavender/ while Sal as a baby looks more like the adult photo there.
I figured he's probably a complex morph with some portion of lavender but wanted to get the opinions of the pros to satisfy my curiosity. As mentioned earlier, it doesn't really matter to us. We're very happy with our friend
