Grooming without Scissors

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Earlier this week I read, on one of the grooming forms, about a groomer who applied for a job, and informed the shop owner that she did not use scissors to groom.

The shop owner told the groomer that the position was filled because she did not want to fool with hiring a groomer that did not use any scissors to groom.

After reading the post and the comments that followed, I got to thinking.

I wondered what her grooms looked like.

The more I thought about it, the more curious I got.

Could I groom an entire dog without picking up my scissors?

I have done a lot of skimming over the years.

Mostly just to skim to take off the bulk of the hair before I do the scissor finish.

I have always used a #7F blade to skim, but for a finer finish I decided to use the #40 blade setting on my cordless clipper.

Well, today I tried it on three different dogs.

I wanted to try it on different hair types.

I did not have time to do each of the dog entirely, so I did parts of the dogs.  :)

I also videoed each one of these dogs so that you could see from start to finish that I did not use scissors.

I also sped up the videos, and added some music, so that they would not be quite so boring.

Just mute the music if you don't like it.  :-)

First was a Cock-a-Poo.

This Cock-a-Poo was getting a #4F on the body, and a 3/4 blade on the legs.

The owners like the top of the head on the short side, and the top of the nose shave short.

I decided to use the #40 blade setting on my cordless clipper.

I wanted to get as smooth and clean a finish as possible.

I found that skimming against the growth of the hair seemed to work the best.

I also used the clipper to cut about a 1/4 " off of the ears.

I was very happy with the way the ears turned out.

Here is a short clip of doing an ear.