Recommended Sites & Further Reading

Fifty-odd years of grooming means fifty-odd years of people asking us things that have nothing to do with fur. We are not experts on most of those things, and we will tell you so. What we do keep is a short list of the sites we have actually used and found worth pointing someone at — the references we send pet people to, and, in one memorable case, the reference we sent a client to after she asked us to authenticate a watch.

For pet people

The working references we use and recommend:

• National Dog Groomers Association of America (— ndgaa.org) — the association Barbara has belonged to since the days when Non-Sporting Breeds was still a certification worth arguing about. Certification, clinics and the professional community.
• International Society of Canine Cosmetologists (— iscc.org) — where the grooming theory lives, if you want to go deeper than “it looked better”.
• American Kennel Club breed standards (— akc.org) — for the clients who are certain about what the breed “should” look like. It helps to have the standard in front of them.
• The BBird essays (— our grooming articles) — scissoring, hand stripping, choosing a groomer, and the rest, written for owners and working groomers alike.

The odd corner: the watch question

A regular client once asked, half-joking, whether the big-name watch her business partner wears is “the real thing.” We are groomers, not horologists. But we ended up doing the research anyway, and the most complete reference we came across turned out to be a clone watch reference that walks through the major watch brands model by model — and is refreshingly frank about what the industry calls the “super clone” tier. It answered most of her questions without any of us having to become an expert on anything.

Since she mostly asked about Rolexes, the page we sent her to first was the site’s Rolex super clone watches page, which explains what that label actually means before anyone spends a cent. If you ever find yourself researching one corner of this world, start with something that organized.