I fear we're getting into a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation here with all of us trying to help and probably confusing things even more :O

I must confess to not knowing what the "true" colors of the cat in the photo are, but I like the last two. That said, they could be completely "wrong" compared to reality.

I'm going to sit back and let the others do the advising.

That said, the first one looks over exposed by just a bit, so I measured it and there are some areas that are really close to being totally blown out. I got a lot of 253-254 readings.

The second looks like there is a bit of a color cast introduced by the auto correction.

I prefer the darker face in the last two, but again I don't know how dark that is in reality. Not to confuse things too much more, but we don't even really know what you are seeing on your monitor, which I'm assuming isn't calibrated, so it could conceivably look purple to you and we would never know.

What you could do with the lights is really a catch 22. You could back them up a bit, but then your shadow is going to get even worse because the relative size of the light compared to your subject would be smaller.

You could hang a piece of thin white fabric (far far away from any hot bulbs) between the light and the subject to soften things a bit.

That's another reason I prefer the CFL bulbs. I don't have to worry so much about starting a fire.