There are many grooming techniques available for dogs — from quick clipper cuts to detailed hand scissoring. At BooBoo Pet Grooming, our priority is ensuring your pet feels comfortable, safe, and stylish. That’s why our professional groomers rely on the hand scissoring technique for the best finish and maximum customization.

Here’s why we prefer hand scissoring over ordinary clippers, and how this method benefits both you and your furry friend.

What Is Hand Scissoring?

Hand scissoring is a grooming technique where the dog’s coat is shaped manually using grooming scissors rather than electric clippers. It’s a meticulous, time-intensive process that gives groomers more control over the final style. At BooBoo Pet Grooming, we use different scissors — including straight scissors, curved scissors, and thinning shears — to achieve a precise and polished look.  The Hand Scissoring method gives better control to style a dog and do profile correction and balancing your dog.  i.e, a round head, around teddy bear round muzzle, want a straight leg but dog’s profile has a turned out leg. The hand scissoring technique can be used on all lengths and all coat texture hair.  The trim will also last much longer if you master the art of hand scissoring.

What Is Ordinary Clippers?

On the other hand, using ordinary clippers for grooming of dogs can be a bit difficult. Primarily some dogs are very sensitive to sound and the sound of the clipper makes because of which dogs don’t stay calm, might get aggressive and in that situation, using clippers can hurt them or can remove chunks of hair and can hence interrupt the grooming process. In fact, while grooming different breeds of dogs such as Bichon, Poodle, Yorkie, Shih Tzu, or Maltese clippers might work, but if you want to keep the hair longer with different hairstyles, using scissors is definitely the right choice.

For those natural hair coated dog (such as a Golden Retriever, border collie, collie, Husky, German Sheppard or Great Pyrenees), using the hand scissoring definitely give them a natural look after trimming.

In the technique of Hand Scissoring, we use different types of scissors such as Straight Scissors, Curved Scissors and Thinning Shears. The curved scissors are best at trimming the hair on dogs’ feet so that they appear nice and round, back legs where the thigh muscle curves down to the hock, that area of the chest that blends down into the front legs, eyebrows, and many other places. 

Using thinning shear while the hand scissoring method is perfect for:

• Modifying the pieces of hair you unexpectedly took out with your other scissors or blades.
• Limiting the inevitable missing mass of hair on an overly excited animal.
• Trimming areas, such as the face, wherein you’re not sure exactly how much hair you really want to take out.
• Removing mats in a way that still leaves hair behind.
• Creating and giving a natural, blended look.

We might use thinning shears for specific areas of the body that are thicker in proportion to the rest of the coat, but thinning the coat is more easily achieved by giving the dog a good bath, blowing out the coat with a forced-air dryer, and carefully brushing out its coat, possibly with the use of an undercoat rake or furminator.

At BooBoo Pet Grooming, the grooming process usually takes 3 hours. Although our professional groomers have mastered the art of scissoring, we have to ensure that the beginning stage of the grooming process is perfect to get that velvet finish on your dog. To have that smooth, velvet finished coat, the dog needs to be clean, spotless. The coat is blown dry so that each hair is straight and that there are no waves or curls left.  Our groomers make sure that there is no mat or tangle in the coat and that Every hair shaft is separated, light and airy.

These items are ‘core skills’ that mastered to perfection by our groomers in order to accomplish gorgeous scissor work.  Our groomers focus on these core skills of the grooming process and hence the process takes around 3 hours to get that beautiful velvet finished  coat

At BooBoo Pet Grooming, we ensure that each pet that leaves our salon is looking good and is feeling good, which is why all our professional groomers use hand scissoring technique, understanding the requirements of clients and then doing it manually so the pet is calm and feels comfortable