How to bleach your dog's coat in the dirty season

Tutorial from a Dogo Argentino breeder with white hair.

An experienced breeder and owner of Dogo Argentino Daria Rudakova told what tricks and super tools help her cope with the most corrosive spots on the white coat of her dogs.

Well-groomed dogs with a white coat color delight people: “What a beauty!”. But such beauty requires especially careful care. When you have a white dog, you want her coat to be always clean and sparkling white. If you now or previously had such a pet, then you perfectly understand how difficult it is to achieve this.

If you haven’t had a white dog yet, just imagine autumn mud or melted snow with reagents in winter. Any walk, even near the house, can turn your snow-white dog into black. And so several times a day. Personally, I sincerely admire the breeders of white long-haired dogs. It’s not easy for them.

I have Dogo Argentino. With such pets, you can’t walk “quickly” near the house on the cleanest area. Instead, we go for walks in forests and parks. There, dogs run heartily through puddles – and sometimes even through swamps, wallow in leaves, clay, or something worse: I’m talking about the so-called “dog spirits.” Dog owners now understand me.

Cleaning clay, muddy spatter, and odorous dirt from white wool seems like an impossible task at first. But after a few years of practice, I discovered several super tools that I now always have at home. They act like the Fairy Godmother’s magic wand for Cinderella. A few simple steps and my dogs are clean and smell good again. No one would have guessed that just a couple of hours they ran through the autumn forest, raising waves of mud around them.

At first glance, it may seem that professional cosmetics are much more expensive than usual ones. But it’s not. Almost all professional cosmetics are concentrated. That is, before use, it must be diluted with water in proportions of 1: 3 or more.

If you calculate the number of washes by cost, then you are spending about the same price for a professional product with harmless ingredients as for a “pig in a poke” with a dubious composition. But the effect of professional cosmetics is more noticeable. Where one professional tool can cope, a whole set of amateur ones may not be able to cope.

To restore my white coat color to my Great Danes, I use shampoos and masks for white coats. The choice of funds depends on the age of the pet. I wash the puppies with Iv San Bernard’s mild PH-neutral shampoo – Talc Puppies. And if the dogs have had a lot of fun on the walk and literally changed color, I use “heavy artillery”. For my dogs I use three products:

Super Cleansing Shampoo. My favorite is 1 All Systems. For me, this is the best option among shampoos for snow-white color. It literally knocks out all the dirt from the wool. Tested on my dogs after swamps, puddles and clay. Even if your pet has been covered in “dog perfume”, just one bath will remove all the unpleasant smell from the coat.
Whitening shampoo Iv San Bernard. I use it after my cleanser. This is a professional shampoo specifically for white-coated dogs. It fills in the pigment and enhances the natural whiteness of the coat.
Mask for all coat types Iv San Bernard Fruit of the Groomer Mint. This is the final care. Shampoos cleanse, and the mask returns the coat to a smooth structure. The mask is concentrated, so a small amount is enough even for such a large dog as the Argentine dogo. Separately, I want to note the texture: it is very pleasant, with an unobtrusive fresh mint aroma. After this mask, the dog literally glows white!

Super cleansing and bleaching shampoos can dry out the coat, so be sure to use a moisturizing treatment afterwards. In addition, after a mask or conditioner, the wool does not become electrified, and dust does not stick to it.

Finally, I will share one more secret. If there are yellowish or pinkish spots on your dog’s coat, traces of tears, urine or food – and you need to quickly remove them, Shazam 1 All Systems Cleansing Gel will help. I apply it directly to dry hair. The gel dries within 15 minutes and can be left on for 2-3 days. But I warn you: the product gives only a cosmetic effect, and the shades on the wool always have a reason. With this problem, you should contact your veterinarian.

In order to act quickly in case of force majeure, before the dog stained all the furniture in the house, I prepared a cheat sheet for you.

Typically, groomers recommend using the same brand. But I slightly neglected this rule and through long experiments I found professional cosmetics of different brands that go well with each other. These are ISB and 1 All Systems.