Bodies are forgiving. The coat is thick, the skin is thick, and a wobbly stroke disappears into the next one. Paws, faces and sanitary areas are none of those things: the skin is thinner, it folds, and the animal is far more defensive of all three. Do these only once the body groom is routine, and only with a calm animal.
Use low speed throughout. On the Glide P1 that is 4,200 rpm. The extra speed buys you nothing in these areas and costs you control.
Paws
There are two separate jobs here and people often confuse them.
Between the pads
Hair growing out from between the pads collects grit, ice and mud, and on smooth floors it makes a dog skate. This is a bare-blade job — no comb.
Sit down and rest the paw in your open palm, pad side up, with the leg following its natural bend. Do not lift the leg out sideways: shoulders and hips do not go that way and a dog that is uncomfortable will pull the whole leg back at exactly the wrong moment.
Spread two toes apart with your fingers so the webbing between them is flat and visible. Run the blade flat across the hair sitting proud of the pads, moving from the heel pad towards the toes. You are levelling hair down to the height of the pads, not scooping between them. The pads themselves should stay untouched; if the blade is touching pad, the angle is wrong.
Work two toes at a time and re-spread for each pair. The curved 2 mm paw comb exists to make this easier — its shallow curve follows the arch of the paw so the blade never presses flat against the skin in the hollow.
Around the outside of the foot
The hair that grows over the top of the foot and hangs around the nails is a tidying job. Stand the foot flat on the floor or on your palm, and clip around the outline of the foot with a short comb or a bare blade, following the shape of the foot rather than cutting a straight line across it. Round is the look you want, not square.
Never clip nails with a clipper. That needs proper nail clippers or a grinder, and it is a separate skill.
Faces
Slow down here more than anywhere else. A face has eyes in it.
- Never point the blade at an eye. Work outwards, away from the eye, always. If a stroke would end near the eye, do it in the other direction instead.
- Keep the blade flat. A tilted blade digs a corner in. Flat contact, light pressure, short strokes.
- Support the head. Your free hand goes under the jaw or cups the muzzle, so that if the animal moves, the head and the clipper move together rather than apart.
- Do not clip whiskers. They are sensory organs, not stray hairs, and dogs and cats use them to judge gaps in the dark.
- Do not clip inside the ears. Ear canal hair is a veterinary or professional-groomer question.
For the fringe over the eyes on a shih tzu, doodle or terrier, comb the hair forward, hold it between two fingers away from the face, and trim with scissors — not the clipper. A clipper on a fringe cuts a hard line that then grows out at one uniform length, and it looks worse every week for two months.
The area a clipper genuinely helps with on a face is the bridge of the nose and the cheeks on a heavily coated breed, using the 30 mm detail head at low speed and short strokes moving outwards from the centre of the face.
Sanitary trims
This is the hair around the genitals and under the tail. Long coat there traps urine and faeces, and on a long-haired cat or a doodle it mats into a solid plate that is genuinely painful.
Use a bare blade or the 2 mm comb, low speed, and short strokes moving away from the body opening rather than towards it. Keep the blade flat and moving; a blade held still against thin skin is what causes clipper burn.
You are clearing a small area, not shaving the whole rear. A patch roughly the size of your palm around the anus, and a strip in front of the genitals on a male dog, is all that is needed.
Skin here is the thinnest on the animal. If you can feel resistance, stop and check the blade for packed hair before pushing on.
Mats: the one thing not to improvise
Never cut a mat out with scissors. Skin lifts up into the base of a tight mat, so what looks like a knot of hair frequently has a fold of the animal in it. This is the single most common way home groomers put a pet in a veterinary consulting room.
The correct method is to work the bare blade underneath the mat, flat against the skin, and slide it out in one piece. If you cannot get the blade under it, the mat is too tight to remove at home and needs a groomer or a vet.
Heat, and how to check for it
Detail work means the blade spends longer in one small area, which is exactly when heat builds. The ceramic and titanium pairing in the Glide P1 head runs cool for around forty minutes of continuous cutting, but no blade stays cool forever.
Check it the way groomers do: touch the blade to the inside of your own wrist every few minutes. If it is uncomfortable on you, it is worse on skin as thin as a sanitary area. Stop, brush the teeth clear of packed hair, and give it a minute.
Afterwards
Rinse the blade head, dry it, and oil it. Detail work packs fine hair deep into the teeth faster than body work does, and a head that goes back in the drawer dirty is a head that pulls next time.
If it has stopped cutting cleanly however well you clean it, it is worn rather than broken — post it back in the prepaid sleeve and we sharpen it free. The refund and returns policy covers how that works.