Perfect Poodle Tail Poof

This month’s tutorial is a step-by-step, stroke-for-stroke, comb-by-comb demonstration of how to get a crispy and delightful Poodle tail poof.

Fig 1) Place the spine of your comb at the bottom of the dog’s sphincter and hold the dog’s tail down over the comb. This will show you where your shave line is for your tail.

Fig 2) Use a short blade of your choice to clip down from your tail shave line into the dog’s body.

Fig 3) This image shows where the “wings” are from that shave work.

Fig 4) Next place the edge of your blade on one “wing,” then turn your blade 90 degrees towards the center and repeat on the other side.

Fig 5) This will show you the direction your shave line should go.

Fig 6) This image shows what it looks like when complete (the body has not yet been groomed.)

Fig 7) To continue, comb all the hair up, place your hand around the bottom of the tail and slide it up until you can cut at a length that is lower than the highest point of topknot.

Fig 8) When you release, it will look like this.

Fig 9) After having combed everything down, you will etch in a line around your shave work to remove any hair hanging past that line.

Fig 10) Then, using a large curved shear, build a strong starting place that helps push your image inward.

Fig 11) At this point, your tail should look like this image. 

Fig 12) With the tail parallel to the ground, split the hair down the middle and comb outward.

Fig 13) Use the strong line that you created with your shears to bring that shape around the sides.

Fig 14) After combing everything toward the topknot, use your large curved shear to complete the rounded image.  

And voilà, the perfect Poodle tail poof! ✂️