I have been wanting to add skin and coat care treatments to my services for house call and thought I would share what I am planning to do, how I do it, and how it's received by my clients. This will be an on going series and hopefully you'll be able to learn from my experiences.
Choosing Spa Services
When deciding what to offer, it's important to think about what is realistic to do in your client's home and doesn't add too much extra baggage to your equipment load. Keeping these things in mind, plus the skin and coat issues I regularly see from my clients, this is a list of services I plan to offer:
- Sugar scrub exfoliating treatments
- Hot oil remoisturizing treatments
- Herbal soaks (Aromatherapy during the bath)
- Canine massage
More than likely I will implement these options slowly, as I get further training in the areas I want to pursue.
My First Spa Treatment in House Call
Recently I had a Bichon client named Rocco that had been suffering from seasonal allergies. He was terribly itchy and his owners weren't sure what to do. After discussing nutrition, and planning a visit to their vet, I offered to try a sugar scrub to help remove the dead dry itchy skin for this poor boy, and help encourage healthy skin to regenerate while they sought treatment for the underlying problem. Since this isn't part of my regular service, but not currently on my services list, I offered to try this for free and if it helped we could go from there. I brought along my camera and thought I would share it with you.
For Rocco I decided to make a scrub using brown sugar and olive oil. I used about 1 cup of brown sugar and enough olive oil to make it slushy. Here's a photo of the scrub before I applied it to Rocco.
This is a photo of Rocco before the bath and scrub. He's not usually a fan of his baths, so this was the best shot I could get of how his skin looked before. For a closer look click on the photo.
I wetted Rocco down with tepid water before adding the scrub. To apply the scrub, I took clumps and applied to the coat gently. This type of scrub doesn't spread well without adding a bit of water after you apply it in order to spread and scrub into the skin. Because of how pink and sensitve Rocco's skin was, I didn't scrub for very long but let him soak in the scrub for about 5 minutes. He was surprisingly still for this portion of the bath, I think he was enjoying himself :)
Scrub applied to Rocco. You can see more of his skin irriatation here. Most of the flaky skin and already come off with the initial application.
Rocco's skin after the scrub had soaked for 5 minutes, and a long cool rinse.
Rocco seemed to enjoy his sugar scrub very much and his owners were quite impressed with the results. Ultimately this was very easy to do, didn't make a mess, and only cost me a few dollars in time and ingredients.
That was really neat...I have not started my house call grooming business yet. I am in the process of getting financed but I would love to bring the spa experience to my clients as well. I always thought aromatherapy would be nice for the pet and groomer as it would be relaxing. Do you have any information on that?
Posted by: Audrey Throgmorton | 09/20/2012 at 07:33 PM