GroomPod 465 transcript

GroomPod 465 What to do when they pass, Whiteners and Optical brighteners - December 13, 2025

00:00:00 Speaker 1: Hello, groomers. You found the groom pod. Welcome to our virtual salon. My name is Suzy and I'm your host. I'm a mobile groomer from Seattle, Washington, and anybody who knows me will tell you I love to talk, especially about my job. And one of my favorite people to talk to is my friend and mentor and the co-star of the show, the curator of ingredients, Miss Barbara Berg.

00:00:36 Speaker 2: That's me. Hey. Hi, everybody. Hi, Suzy. What's up today?

00:00:43 Speaker 1: Oh, it's a very exciting day. It's episode four hundred sixty five of the Groom Pod. Recorded on November eighteenth, twenty twenty five, in Snohomish, Washington and Greenville, South Carolina. This podcast is brought to you by our kind sponsors Best Shot Show Season, precision, sharp groomer and stasko. And if you'd like to tip us, you can do so at our website, the green dot com, where you'll find a donation button that goes straight to Barbara. Or you can join us on Patreon to support the show. This week we're going to talk about what to do when the animals pass O.

00:01:17 Speaker 2: Which has been happening to you.

00:01:20 Speaker 1: Oh.

00:01:21 Speaker 2: Boy.

00:01:22 Speaker 1: Miserable. When I got the phone call this week that Lewis had passed. I was just like, come on, universe, stop already. Just stop.

00:01:32 Speaker 2: Already. Yeah.

00:01:34 Speaker 1: Too much. And then we're also going to talk about whitening and optical brighteners. So this week what's new is brought to you by Groomer software. If you haven't found groomer you're missing out. Groomer is an all in one software solution for your grooming business. Whether you are a solo mobile groomer or manage several shops, groomer has everything you need twenty four hour online booking and forms routing. Credit card processing reminders, Google Calendar and QuickBooks integration, and so much more. And the best customer service anywhere. Shop. Mobile or house call. Groomer has you covered and they're giving us a free month. Just enter grooming twenty two in the coupon code. Well, I made a decision about my holiday gifts and I ordered them.

00:02:20 Speaker 2: Oh, what'd you get?

00:02:21 Speaker 1: So I went with, uh, collar charm for the dogs. That's a little paw print. But when they showed up, I looked at the box, and I thought, my. That's kind of a small box. Okay. They're really tiny. They're so tiny. Uh, so I'm getting a good laugh as I hand them out to everyone. They're so tiny that the clip on them won't go on to a collar loop at all. That's how tiny they are. You know, sometimes these things happen. I know they happen. So they come with a little bag and a little tag that says thank you for something. It says, thank you for something. Then on the back I write, thank you for the great year. And then I sign my name. I thought, there's got to be a better way. So I went on to my favorite place to shop, Amazon, and I found Keyrings. They were very cheap. Now if anybody needs a keyring, just let me know and I'll send you an empty keyring with nothing on it. But I attached the charm to the keyring and then the keyring can fit on all the collars. Now it doesn't look quite so silly. I solved the problem, but I'm still going to tell the story, and I'm still going to get everybody to laugh at how tiny these little dog pawprints are. But they're really cool. They're sparkly in the middle, the little toe beans are sparkly and all different colors. They're going over well. Everybody seems to like them so far. I've given a few of them out. I don't give my monthly clients them until the month between Christmas and Thanksgiving, but the people that I'm not going to see between Christmas and Thanksgiving, I'm giving them theirs now. So I enjoy that. It makes me feel good. But I still was kind of hemming and hawing. Boy, that makes me sound old to hem and haw.

00:04:08 Speaker 2: I mean.

00:04:10 Speaker 1: I'm hemming and hawing about what holiday shampoo to use because I do that. For me, that's one hundred percent for me. Now the matching Cologne, I do that for the people. But the shampoo, that's all me. I like to smell it. It fills my grooming trailer with good smells. And I looked I wanted to do the funky poodle stuff, but because I'm in Seattle area and because he's in the Florida, it's about as far as you could possibly ship. So I didn't really want to pay for shipping all the shampoo I wanted from them all the way from Florida. So I pondered and I looked and I tried to find something, and then I reverted to my old standard that I haven't used for years and years and years and years and years. Nature's specialties. Because I knew that their fragrances have staying power. She's rolling her eyes at me, people. Her eyes are rolling again. That's three episodes in a row where her eyes have just disappeared in the back of her head.

00:05:13 Speaker 2: Yes.

00:05:14 Speaker 1: I did it. It's your fault. I'm just going to fully blame you for this. It is your fault because you started to say nice things about I groom. And we also talked about Chris Christensen, which are all owned by the same people now. And since nature's specialty is disclosing their ingredients, I figured I'd give their Sugar Puff Fairy a try. And I also got some barking cider Cologne that smells like really potent apple smell. So I've got the apple smell and I have the sugar smell. I couldn't figure out from the description what the Sugar Plum Fairy was going to smell like. And I'm still not sure of what it smells like. It's kind of an identifiable smell of sugary sweetness. It's okay. It's not as good as I was hoping, but I will use it for this Christmas season and it will be gone soon enough. And then I also bought some plum silky, because I do love that. And I can and my clients love it, so I can revert to that if I'm not happy with the Sugar Plum Fairy, because I really was hoping it was going to have more of a holiday fragrance, and it just really doesn't. It's just I'm not saying it's a big letdown. It's a minor letdown. But the fragrance does stay on the dogs.

00:06:33 Speaker 2: It's more like a birthday party fragrance.

00:06:36 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like birthday cake. Smells kind of like birthday cake. A little bit like cotton candy, which are really don't have strong smells. You know, they're not really potent smells. Although picture this. You're standing in front of the Disneyland castle and the wind blows and you smell a mix of popcorn and cotton candy. That's a memory that I cannot get out of my head. So when I smell this, I do smell a little Disneyland cotton candy, but it's not as identifiable a fragrance as I was hoping for. I went and smelled the Chris Christensen stuff, and that just disappears almost immediately for me. It's just gone right after you spray it, and I'm not looking for that. I've got my people trained to enjoy a walking air freshener, and most of them and the ones that don't, I stay away from that. But they all love that season. It is. And I want to use something that really makes people joyous and happy and all of that stuff. And, um, this one didn't quite do it for me. I've got some new shampoos to play with, and I bought a couple other colognes too, so. Oh, you know what? Cologne was spectacular. They have a strawberry frothing shampoo. I bought the Cologne that matches that frothing shampoo. It's strawberry. Oh my gosh. That is incredibly strawberry. I mean, it smells like I just put a fresh strawberry on the dog, so I'm going to use that. When strawberries start coming into season, I'll use that one. Not yet. I also have the apple. The apple is festive holiday smell and it is a potent apple. It smells delicious. I love it and I have to give it to them. I know you don't love their products, but they really probably use a lot of stabilizer or scent extender in their fragrances and I like it. So I treated myself. I figured since it was for me anyway, that I would treat myself. Okay, go ahead, give it to me.

00:08:43 Speaker 2: No, it's a season to do what you're going to do to make it through this season as smoothly as possible. There's always ways to rationalize when there's something you want, really want. You'll I mean, I know you, you're very rational, which means you can come up with a rationalization to just about anything. And it's probably been a strong point in your entire life since you were a little kid.

00:09:14 Speaker 1: It is kind of built in to rationalize.

00:09:18 Speaker 2: I'm not a big fan of fragrances, but this time of year it's a fragrance time of year. I think that fragrances have such a powerful psychological place for us that I have candles and and incense and smells around, because this is the time of year where I want that I don't have any real holiday smells. I might have to break down and get something because I. I like a kind of an apple cinnamon smell.

00:09:57 Speaker 1: I walked into the grocery store and they've got all of those pine cones out front and they smell like cinnamon. And oh, I love that. I want to go get some pine cones and set them around the house because they're so delicious. Ah, yes, I love this time of year. It's so much fun. And I will say already the Christmas lights are out. I think they people started putting up their Christmas lights here in Seattle. It was the week after Halloween and they started to pop up. And now there are Christmas lights up everywhere. So weird. That's so early. My mother's birthday was December eighteenth and we were not allowed to. Ho ho ho in the house until after her birthday was done. So we never got a Christmas tree until December nineteenth. We never had any presents. We didn't have any wreaths. We never had lights up until after December eighteenth. So to. Put up your Christmas lights the week after Halloween is pretty weird.

00:10:52 Speaker 2: I did.

00:10:54 Speaker 1: That's cool. I mean, I love it.

00:10:56 Speaker 2: So I had already on my balcony. I had the purple rain, purple rain, purple rain. And then I also had the four sprigs of green eyeballs and they're solar powered. And I have them all stuck in my potted plant. So I had all of these little floppy green eyeballs, and I just add more colors and some white. And then so I just incorporated the Halloween stuff.

00:11:39 Speaker 1: That's cool.

00:11:41 Speaker 2: And then I got the a Twinkie. Fairy lights have got a bazillion choices of combination colors and and flashing and all of this kind of stuff. I got it going. Why wait? Just go for it now. I see.

00:11:57 Speaker 1: Where does it is? I love it because why put up lights for just a month? They're so beautiful. They make the houses so beautiful. And especially right now, where it's just rain after rain after rain. The lights in the shiny environment are just so beautiful, so I'm happy with it. It's good. I can't bring myself to put my I only have one light. I have like a little snowflake thing that projects up onto my ceiling. I guess I could put that on then I would be more festive.

00:12:29 Speaker 2: It's. It's for you. What the hell?

00:12:33 Speaker 1: Because nobody drives down here. I can guarantee you that.

00:12:39 Speaker 2: There's no need to deny yourself?

00:12:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you're right.

00:12:43 Speaker 2: You know, like, it's not a harmful pleasure.

00:12:47 Speaker 1: No, it's it's a pretty benign pleasure.

00:12:50 Speaker 2: It's a pretty benign pleasure. So I say go for it. I just bought a pair of coming today. Uh, pink cowboy boots.

00:13:03 Speaker 1: Oh, my goodness, that's pretty cool.

00:13:07 Speaker 2: Yeah, they're half calves. I don't like the totally high because I'm so high boots. Because I'm so short that it looks like I don't have any legs, you know? So. So I get the half calf and then I get the look without, uh, chopping off my legs, and and I spotted these pink half calf embroidered, uh, pink cowboy boots. Inexpensive under forty dollars.

00:13:42 Speaker 1: Nice.

00:13:43 Speaker 2: And I had already. I'm. I mean, for me, it's the time of year. It's when I like to wear tights. And so I and I, and I wanted boots to go with my tights. So I bought a pair of inexpensive black half calf cowboy boots on Amazon. And they came and they were surprisingly comfortable and I able to walk. And oh, by the way, I got an injection in my I got a cortisone injection in my kneecap and my knees working better. And I'm starting physical therapy next week.

00:14:31 Speaker 1: All right.

00:14:32 Speaker 2: Don't have a date for my knee surgery yet.

00:14:35 Speaker 1: Cool.

00:14:36 Speaker 2: So that's an update on my life.

00:14:39 Speaker 1: Excellent.

00:14:39 Speaker 2: Where were.

00:14:40 Speaker 1: We? Well, we were about to head into our first appointment.

00:14:44 Speaker 2: Oh, well, I guess so.

00:14:50 Speaker 1: It is a bummer of a I mean, it's a it's a very serious topic. What do we do when they pass? But first let's hear from our sponsors.

00:15:01 Speaker 2: Hey groomers, it's time to have some fun with fragrances. Show season will help the holidays happen with their crazy selection of holiday smells. Get several bottles of spray and let your clients choose. Fragrance sprays include Christmas Spice and Merry Cranberry, holiday Hug and Hot buttered rum. Sugar cookie and pumpkin spice come with their own matching shampoos. Pick up a bottle of Sparkle Spray for your party animals and some aromatherapy for your entryway show's season has you covered. Make show season your holiday headquarters.

00:15:50 Speaker 1: Ready, groomers. Here comes our first appointment. I forgot to tell you I did a really fun thing. What? I made up a song with AI to introduce the first appointment, but I didn't like it, so I'm going to redo it. But it was really cool. It made up lyrics. It was two and a half minutes long. I have to tell it. It needs to be 30s or less. But it was so neat. It made up a song about us. It talked about us in the song and the lyrics, and it was a really catchy tune that kind of sounded like our intro. Yeah, so that was really fun. So stay tuned folks. A new first appointment intro is coming. So, you know, Barbara, we talk a lot on this show about the physical demands of grooming, like the scissoring and the wrestling with the dogs and all of that stuff. But we rarely talk about the emotional toll, which I seem to be an expert on this this month. Definitely. And we see these dogs every four to six weeks, and we watch them grow up and we watch them turn gray, and inevitably we have to watch them pass. And today we are tackling one of the hardest questions in our industry. What do you do when a client's pet passes away? How do we handle the grief, the business side of things? And how do you say the right thing when you're heartbroken too? So, as you know, I've just had a ton of loss. And it is cyclic because you start your business, you add a bunch of new people, you bring in the puppies, and then all the puppies age at the same rate. And then all of a sudden your puppies that were your puppies start dying. And that's what's happening now, probably for the second time in my grooming career. What are some of the things we can do to let our people know how much we love their pet? I think the hardest one to do, and also the most important one to do, is to call them when you hear about it. And I think talking to people, especially someone who needs to talk to someone who loves their pet as much as they do, is so important.

00:17:51 Speaker 2: Oh, I know.

00:17:53 Speaker 1: It's such a hard phone call for me. As a matter of fact, I've got two of them to make and I haven't done either one yet. One of them is starting to get to where I really need to call her. I just don't want to do it. It's so freaking hard to make that phone call. Do you have any suggestions for me? How can I make this any easier? I've got to force myself to do it.

00:18:15 Speaker 2: I believe that we serve an important although UN paid for service.

00:18:24 Speaker 1: Unrecognized for sure.

00:18:26 Speaker 2: That has to do with the recognizing the grief associated because not all of our friends validate the level of affection and attachment that we have with our pets. And I might myself lost, um, an adopted pet that I had I rescued off in the middle of the street in front of my shop, and I called him Lost Dog, and I had him for quite a few years, and then he died in my arms on a Sunday morning. And, uh, he wasn't quite dead by the time I got to the vet, but he was basically he passed in my arms. And then I had a music gig that evening. I was still pretty fucked up about lost dog passing, and I went to my gig and they said, well, what's going on with you anyway? And I said, well, my dog died. And the band member said, well, get another one.

00:19:43 Speaker 1: That's not helpful. Ah.

00:19:47 Speaker 2: Oh. I was like, it was just like, so dishonored the bond. In fact, I had one of my clients, a very successful owner of like three radio stations and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I groomed their dogs for a number of years. They had the second one, the first one died and they passed, and then the second one died. And it was so hard on the man that this guy came in the shop, and I ended up hugging him and holding him while he wept. His wife was kind of an iceberg, if I may say so. Then I had the thing. Ha, ha. I've told you this trip about the guy that brought his deceased dog in plastic into my shop, dripping from the ice, melting away. He had been frozen at the vet.

00:20:55 Speaker 1: Oh, jeez.

00:20:56 Speaker 2: He brings Pikachu. He comes in and they're. I mean, you know, like, I already knew the dog had passed. And then I see my door opens and I see the owner of the dog that just died a few days ago. And he's carrying the dog, and he's he's undone the wrapping enough to just expose the head. And the dog had to have one of its eyes removed. And so it that was a that was raw and the dog looked like shit.

00:21:36 Speaker 1: Yes. Dog popsicle.

00:21:40 Speaker 2: Popsicle. And I'm standing there and tears are flowing and I'm petting, you know, he said, I just thought you might want to say goodbye and I oh yeah. And I'm petting the dog and they. And the front door opens and in comes a brand new customer that I've never seen before.

00:22:04 Speaker 1: Oh, boy.

00:22:06 Speaker 2: So I said, quick, Tom, take Pikachu to the tub and pretend you're bathing him. So Tom goes in there, he's running the water, pretending he's washing his dead, dead dog.

00:22:24 Speaker 1: That's priceless.

00:22:25 Speaker 2: And I'm acting like absolutely nothing is going on. And I take it, dog. Yeah.

00:22:36 Speaker 1: You should have gotten an Academy Award for that.

00:22:40 Speaker 2: I mean, really, it was it was an unforgettable experience. And and that guy who was a kind of an emotionally unavailable man, I think he was closeted, to tell you the truth.

00:22:56 Speaker 1: Uh huh.

00:22:57 Speaker 2: Uh, some some of these men who are gay and cannot come to terms with that. They lead such lonely lives. They he used to go down to Rocky Point, Mexico, though. And that's where you go to have a good time. Well, anyway, so I, I had another one. They brought me the dog. They were on the way to the Humane Society to put the dog down, and the the owner just can't help but come by. And they just wanted me to say, oh yeah, it's time.

00:23:38 Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of times they look for confirmation from us. Had to make that call a few times.

00:23:44 Speaker 2: That's one of the things that we do. We we give them permission to grieve the loss. We give them permission to do the euthanasia.

00:23:55 Speaker 1: We find the lumps.

00:23:57 Speaker 2: We find the lumps. There's so much that we do that we don't get credit for. And sharing the bond between a dog and its humans is a service in itself.

00:24:17 Speaker 1: Sometimes we need to talk to the owner too. I mean, sometimes it's for us for sure. And, uh, for me, grieving is a very private thing. Like, I don't like to cry in public. I'm a John Wayne kid, you know, I'm tough. Rub a little dirt on it and move on. But some of these dogs I'm so attached to, it's just devastating when I lose them. And what I'm finding now is I'm losing the people also, because I started with them when they were retiring and wanted their dogs groomed at home. And now that's twenty plus years, and now they're in their eighties and they're dying. And it's very it's very difficult time. You know, I'm grateful that I still get puppies, that I take puppies occasionally. And some of these people, when their pet passes away, you do the math and you know, they're not going to get another dog like their eighty something. And they're they're not going to get another dog. It means goodbye. And that's hard. There's other things we can do too that are pretty important. And I have a tendency to be a little lax with this as well.

00:25:22 Speaker 3: You know.

00:25:23 Speaker 1: Because I'm not looking at the people every day, but, um, memory lane type gestures, you know, they're kind of low cost, high emotion things that we can do. Oftentimes we take pictures of the pets. I used to do portraits every year for Christmas. It's really nice if you've got a good picture of the pet freshly groomed to go down and buy a little frame and give that to them, um, the next time you see them, or mail it to them or digitally send it to them. Also, if you're not going to send a picture for me, a specific memory of their dog. So, for instance, if your dog had a specific quirk like always bit at the hose, well, I'm going to really miss the fact that he's not going to be biting at the water hose anymore in my bathtub, or if they used to lay down and go to sleep on the table. You tell them that bring them something from your world into their world about their pet, and I tend to do that on every groom. I tell a little tale about what went on, you know, make, uh, make the people aware of the grooming process and the quirks that happen there. But if you do it on the last, I don't know, the last goodbye, it can be a very touching thing. Another thing you can do is a first and last picture. If you've taken pictures, you've got a puppy picture and you have a senior picture and put those together and send them a digital copy of that. So those are some of the things. But on that last one, that's a tearjerker. So be ready for that. There's also like if you want to go more professional, you can do, uh, a tribute, a donation or a tribute somewhere like plant a tree in their honor in, in some memorial forest. Or you can send them a tree or you can do a shelter donation. You can do stuff like that. One time somebody bought me a pig for Christmas that they gave to some family in some other country. I thought that was kind of cool. You could do that. It was a little weird, but I mean, I wouldn't necessarily do that for this occasion, but there's all kinds of little tributes you can do. And then there's physical gifts that you can give. You know, you can cut the hair off from the last grooming and put that in something and a keepsake of some sort for them. You can use a service. There's a service out there called Pet Perennials, which has really helped me be a little more timely with my sympathy gifts. And you just go online and they have an assortment of gifts that range from elaborate to simple. Like, for instance, I had a dog that passed away for a lady who has Parkinson's and she's in a nursing home and she can't collect more stuff. But I wanted to give her something, so I gave her a little keychain with the Gaelic prayer animal prayer on it. So I sent her that. Uh, but they have a lot of variety. They handwrite the notes. They're very personalized. So that's that's pet perennials. I've also sent flowers. Flowers die though. So flowers are good for people who you don't want to collect stuff. But if they've been a client for a long time, the amount of money that they have spent with you over fifteen years of their pets is worth an eighty dollars bouquet of flowers on a day. That's probably their worst day of the recent memory. So I think that's good. But even better yet, you could give them a succulent plant. Send them a plant instead. A succulent because. Because people like me don't kill them. I can kill most any other plant.

00:28:55 Speaker 3: But.

00:28:56 Speaker 1: But if you send them a plant or an azalea or something they can plant in the yard, that's another way to have a lasting memory of their animals and pet perennials actually has a seed garden that you can spread out, and it has a little tag, and you can personalize it that sticks in the ground where the garden would be that memorializes the pet. So there's lots of ways you can memorialize the pets just like me last week. If you use a booking software, a software to to run your business with, when you hear that animal passes, immediately go in and archive the pet so that they then don't get a reminder the next grooming appointment. Because there's nothing worse than getting that reminder. I get them from the vets occasionally because I forget to notify them that the pet has passed. Sometimes that's the way the people figure out they didn't tell you their pet had passed. But if you do hear, definitely. Yeah, fix that right away because you don't want to send a message. What do you do with their appointment spot? Do you fill it right away? I don't, because secretly in the back of my mind, I'm hoping they get another pet because I don't want to take a new person. New people don't know me. I like my old people, so I just want them to get another pet. But somewhere in the conversation, I will always tell them that you have a spot with me forever. So if they get another dog somewhere along the line. You can still call me and I'll always take my previous clients. So. Anything else?

00:30:20 Speaker 2: No. You're very sweet.

00:30:23 Speaker 1: Oh, well. Thank you.

00:30:25 Speaker 2: I think that that's some very good ideas. And you don't have to feel like you have to do something right. It's up to you, but it's a way of making some kind of closure of the whole circle of life there and opening the door for a new puppy or another appointment or another Labrador.

00:30:53 Speaker 1: Yes, in my case, they're kids dogs. Because, you know, if they're not going to get another dog, you can certainly call and ask me if I'll do your kids dog at your house so that I can see you, because I'll do that. That's one way to keep connected. So the physical gifts, I save those for my VIP people. I don't just automatically send a physical gift. But I know the people that really would mean something to you, so I will send them something. So. All right, well, let's take another break and then we'll come back with Berg's classroom, which is about optical brighteners and whitening shampoos and stuff. It's very exciting. The groom Pod and Precision Sharp would like to invite you to check out the newest precise cut shear called blinks. Its patented design features a thumb ring that slides the length of the handle for perfect ergonomic placement of your thumb, slide it, lock it into place, and get your best grooms on. Check it out at precision. Groomers, take your seats. It's time for bird's classroom. All right, let's shake off the heavy stuff and get back to the tub. We're moving on to a topic that honestly feels a little bit like magic, but I know it's actually science. We all have those clients who want their b-scans blinded by the light white or their schnauzers to have that crisp contrast. We grab the whitening shampoo, but do we actually know how it glows? Is it dye? Is it bleach or is it physics? Luckily, I'm sitting next to the guru of ingredients herself, Barbara, take us to school on optical brighteners its colorant.

00:32:45 Speaker 2: There's dyes and there's optical brighteners. These are all ways that we can achieve a whiter white or a brighter color. The most common way that a shampoo formulator makes a shampoo leave a greater whitening effect is by using a DNC blue. I you know, I forget what DNC stands for.

00:33:22 Speaker 1: Huh I wonder?

00:33:25 Speaker 2: Oh well, I regular you know, like like, uh, a regular blue colorant. Blue number one is one of them. Uh, and actually the blue colorants have become a little bit under investigation lately. Really? Yeah. Because they appear to have some kind of a bad e effects. They are somewhat toxic, but you're not going to get that much in a shampoo. So the optical brighteners don't seem to have any real downside, other than they were not developed strictly for animals. They were developed for laundry.

00:34:18 Speaker 1: Drugs and cosmetics.

00:34:20 Speaker 2: Drugs and cosmetics.

00:34:23 Speaker 1: Yeah, drugs and cosmetic colorant. So that's what the DNC is okay.

00:34:28 Speaker 2: Okay, so all of these whitening options come to us by way of the laundry industry. There's other ingredients that have come to us by way of the laundry industry, including surfactants and, um, conditioning ingredients and courts. And so they all have a real long history going back to the days of old when you would just use a bluing agent in a in a bottle. So what was the name of that favorite one? Susie.

00:35:11 Speaker 1: Mrs. Stewart?

00:35:13 Speaker 2: Yes, Mrs. Stewart. And then if you were a kid, you could build a crystals with. Did you ever do that? Did you ever grow the crystals from the Mrs. Stewart's Bluing laundry?

00:35:29 Speaker 1: No. We grew crystals from sugar, but we never did the Mrs. Bluing. But I knew you could.

00:35:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, you could, and it's. It was commonly done. And they kind of made it suggestion as a fun thing for kids. A science project that same color that's accepted for drugs and cosmetics has been used for hair, which is a substratum of cosmetics anyway.

00:36:01 Speaker 1: Yes.

00:36:02 Speaker 2: What the blue does is it simply reflects back more of a blue hue, which looks to the human eye as more white.

00:36:13 Speaker 1: So it is a little magic.

00:36:15 Speaker 2: So it is a little magical. Yeah, a magician trick, like an optical illusion, you know. And then the optical brighteners themselves are a chemical.

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00:37:11 Speaker 2: Okay, so in addition to the the blue colorant D and C, blue number one or DNC blue number, whatever is the most common whitening agent that you find in shampoos. It's it's been used for years now. Recently, blue dyes have become a little bit under investigation for growing concern, for being somewhat toxic and having a toxic potential when used repeatedly. Okay, repeated exposure. I'm pretty sure that unless you're doing every dog in a blue white that you wouldn't have a danger to the bather. But as with medicinal shampoos, I think it's a good idea to use gloves when you're doing colorants. Just as a rule, in addition to blue colorants, we also have blue dyes, which are a more permanent kind of extension. And I have even seen I can't remember the product, but I remember seeing blue used as a colorant for whitening. I would not approve of that. I think Jensen Blue is a pretty powerful chemical that is used in chemistry as a dye agent and, you know, like to be able to see something on a slide and that kind of thing.

00:39:07 Speaker 1: I use it for my horses. Thrush.

00:39:10 Speaker 2: Yeah. You can use it for thrush. My father used gentian violet when he fell and had a real bad abrasion on his hand. They couldn't stitch up because his skin was so parchment. So they treated it with gentian violet. Really worked. But, um, it's a little bit beyond the pale. That's a tongue in cheek joke. Ha, ha.

00:39:36 Speaker 1: Here we go. So when they use a dye, does that mean that it could actually dye the hair?

00:39:44 Speaker 2: Yes. So speaking of doing that, that's what Chris Christensen does. Chris Christensen uses acid dyes for all of his different white on white, black on black, red on red. All of those. and those are just really heavy duty dyes and they have been made anionic. There's where you get the acid word because on the pH scale, they're acidic, they're anionic. So they attach well to the hair and help the coat reflect. Again, that just simply reflect back a wider light. Now optical brighteners are another way of doing that. And optical brighteners are probably the most magical of any kind. I did find the name of one. Let me see where it is. Um, okay. Best shot uses. Here's the name. Think of the three D's.

00:40:53 Speaker 1: Okay.

00:40:54 Speaker 2: Disodium diamino. stilbene disulfonate. Disodium diamino stilbene disulfonate. I said it there.

00:41:06 Speaker 1: That's the optical brightening agent.

00:41:08 Speaker 2: That's the optical brightening agent, which actually absorbs the one band of color and gives back another band of color. It's just the most magical. And the optical brightener, such as disodium diamino stilbene disulfonate is good on color as well as on white and black. Blue shampoos work well on black dogs too, but don't do jack for blondes. Red's the other brand that I found that uses an optical Brightener identifies as using an optical Brightener is show season, and show season doesn't name their optical brightener, and both season and best shot also used some DNC violet number two in their whitener shampoo to tell the purchaser consumer that it's got the blue in it.

00:42:33 Speaker 1: But best shots is just very pale blue. It's not really a dark deep blue show. Seasons is brilliant. Beautiful cobalt blue. Yeah. And I love the color of show season.

00:42:44 Speaker 2: Bright boy in Chris Christensen is the bluest blue. I don't know, I actually prefer violet to blue. A lot of human shampoos now used violet color instead of blue because it does a better job. I think, of handling the yellowing that's common. So then I checked out a couple of other brands to see what they were using. I groom uses DC Violet, bio groom uses blue one, red thirty three red and blue make violet. Arturo uses a DNC colorant unnamed. So then in Chris Christensen uses the acid dye show season and best shot use actual optical brighteners that come from the laundry.

00:43:49 Speaker 1: So it looks like that. There's also some silicone involved.

00:43:54 Speaker 2: Silicone is is good in that it just makes all colors pop and it makes the coat glisten. It it makes white appear more white. But the real mechanism of getting a dog the whitest is the cleaning. Because what happens to some dogs? They get dirt under the cuticle lens. And so it just makes it look kind of gray and off. In order to get that deeper dirt, you need a stronger surfactant. I don't know what Chris Christiansen is using right now. I didn't check that out, but they used to use sodium lauryl sulfate, the most strong surfactant. The first step in getting a white dog really is a deep cleansing. So if you don't have a whitener, if you use a clarifying shampoo before you use your favorite shampoo or the bluing shampoo, you'll get a better color. Unless you have a shampoo that uses sulfates. Sulfates have their place. And good deep cleaning is one of them.

00:45:24 Speaker 1: I have heard, like through the fear mongering world, that optical brighteners deposit tiny particles of plastic on the coat. Is that true?

00:45:33 Speaker 2: No.

00:45:34 Speaker 1: So that's just one of those myths that circulates.

00:45:37 Speaker 2: Circulates, right? That's a myth. That's incorrect. It's a liquid chemical. It would have to say disodium diamino. Still being. Pirates or something. They would have to be some kind of plastic word in there. There isn't.

00:45:58 Speaker 1: Is it an allergen or the optical brighteners? Did they cause allergies?

00:46:02 Speaker 2: No, they they're not highly allergic.

00:46:06 Speaker 1: Okay.

00:46:07 Speaker 2: Good question.

00:46:08 Speaker 1: Cool. I was skeptical about optical brighteners. I really didn't think that the magic of science was working there, I didn't know. And then I bought the best shot, one shot whitener. And I was super surprised at how well it actually worked on my white dogs. It was really impressive and I was poo pooing it for years. I poo poo all kinds of things. I was poo pooing that. I was like, you have to have the dye. It's got to be dark blue. But it turns out it works really, really well. I really like it. So now I've stopped messing around with the other ones and I just do the best shot one. But that's just me personally. It works well in my system.

00:46:51 Speaker 2: I used the show season bright as my go to shampoo for years, and I loved it. And I felt that it just made every dog's color just a little bit better, a little bit more awesome. You know, as they say, makes the color pop, just makes it more visually impactful. Like, whoa, those colors.

00:47:19 Speaker 1: Okay. Well, I think that covers it. I use the Whiteners quite a bit on my regular dogs too, just because I probably, probably from the last time we talked about this, learned that the optical brighteners optically brighten everything, not just white. So it's been very helpful. And you might notice us repeating some topics. This is going to make it easier for me to get some of the important things to be searchable. As you know, I'm having a difficult time with the search engines and having to redo things in a different way, which is fine. I'm learning how to do it, and it's working out, because now I can search the last two episodes that have been up and find that they pop up really well. But this is one of those that we did ten years ago, and I thought we'd go over it again so that it once again is searchable. Yay! Let's hope. And I'm going to continue to kind of plow through some of the old topics and we'll repeat them. I hope you guys still listen though.

00:48:20 Speaker 2: Hey, I like doing that because it gives me a chance to kind of update what I'm telling the listeners so I can kind of update my impressions. Because things chemistry is a constantly evolving science. It is constantly evolving. There's just like, no, no, coasting yesterday. Shampoo is not tomorrow's.

00:48:52 Speaker 1: That's right. And we do have a handout for this. I'll let Barbara kind of review it. Did you review it? Your blog post?

00:49:00 Speaker 2: Oh, my blog post.

00:49:02 Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:49:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, we can do it. I have a an article that I wrote about it. Gee, I sort of would like to rewrite it.

00:49:10 Speaker 1: Well, I was mentioning that because you have the option to say don't put it up until I'm done rewriting it. Susie. So if you want that, I will wait.

00:49:19 Speaker 2: I read that article and I thought that article might benefit from some, uh, editing as well as I can add this information on the one two, three, four six brands and how they achieve their whitening. And I thought I would ask AI to, uh, lend a hand and see if AI would, like, organize my material a little bit differently, because I don't think the article flows real well. So I'm going to edit it with AI and then we'll post it.

00:50:00 Speaker 1: Okay. Sounds good. All right. Well thanks for being here everyone. We really appreciate it. As I say every time, please support our sponsors. Please support the podcast. Please continue to listen to us blather on because we like doing it. Hey.

00:50:15 Speaker 2: And thank you for your donations to my Try It Out fund. I just really, really, really appreciate that. I'll be trying out some stuff for you and feel free to ask me to try out something.

00:50:33 Speaker 1: Yes, you can make a request with your donation. That works out fine.

00:50:37 Speaker 2: Yeah, sure.

00:50:37 Speaker 1: Cool. Yes. And by the way, we did take a look at quicker. Slicker. found some interesting things. Basically, Barbara says it's just one ingredient, but it works and I like the way it smells. So there is that. But it is just a very simple formula.

00:50:53 Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes it a bit akin or a very similar, but not the same as, um, the max.

00:51:04 Speaker 1: Simple one ingredient kind of a thing.

00:51:07 Speaker 2: Probably guarantee you that it's not nearly as, uh, condensed and concentrated as the max.

00:51:16 Speaker 1: Know you're paying for a lot of dilution.

00:51:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, you can just probably just a few max bubbles into this shampoo and get some results. It's how strong it is.

00:51:28 Speaker 1: Yep. I do it all the time. All right, well, we'll see you next time on the groom pod. Thanks for being here. Bye bye, everyone. Happy grooming.

00:51:36 Speaker 2: Take care of yourselves because we love you and we need you.