Really, I love it that much.
Despite the fact that I don't like promoting Mega Corporate Stuff Made In China, I gotta give a nod to this grooming tool.
Ok, maybe I've been living in the Doggy Dark Ages, trying to bathe my dogs with my bare hands, some shampoo, and a cloth for their faces. My method always felt inadequate. I was never convinced I'd worked through three inches of Corgi fleece to get down to the skin. I rinsed for ages while the dogs started squirming and still imagined there were suds left. I frequently found missed spots when the dogs got out. And the dogs clearly despised the entire process, living for those joyful moments when they got toweled at the end (something they both love).
Maybe everyone else in the world has been using something just like this, that they got for half the price from local merchants. And it was handmade. By skilled union craftsmen. In a cornfield. In Iowa.
But for myself, it's the first thing I've seen exactly like this:
http://tinyurl.com/26upov6
The picture is deceiving. Basically it's a two-sided glove. One side is lovely short, soft, perfectly spaced rubber nubbins. You put the dog in the shower, you thoroughly wet the dog. You turn off the water, put a nickel-sized amount of shampoo on the rubber side, add a little water, and start scrubbing. The nickel-sized bit of shampoo cleans the entire dog. The nubs work down to the skin. The heavily diluted shampoo suds up nicely. Remember the first time you used one of those body poofs instead of a wash-cloth? It felt like that.
The dogs? They stood there. They seemed to almost like it. They looked relaxed. It was like a massage.
The other side of the glove is a microfiber cloth, perfect for cleaning faces and ears and eyes, and then adding some shampoo (just a dot) and doing paws. They even didn't mind their paws done. And they LOVED the way the microfiber rubbed their faces.
The nubbins loosened lots of hair. The large surface area meant I cleaned the dogs, thoroughly, in a quarter of the time it takes by hand. And the tiny amount of shampoo means I rinsed them in record time, with no suspicious-looking spots that would not stop sudsing.
I love this thing. The only drawback is the nature of the material means it can't be cleaned in hot water, so if you need to, say, clean coyote poop off your dog you might want to use a different product.
I can't say enough good things about it. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I've been a dog-washing cave woman all these years. But thank you, product design folks at Martha Stewart. Just please, consider making it in a cornfield in Iowa next time.