hen I first began sourcing products for the professional grooming industry, I would speak to a groomer—someone who had spent years refining their technique, could tell you exactly why they chose one pair of shears over another, and had strong opinions about clipper blade tension and dryer airflow—and ask them what they used to clean their clients’ ears and eyes. The answer was almost always the same: whatever came with the salon when they started, whatever was on the shelf or whatever the supplier had on promotion that month.

I found this genuinely puzzling at first. But then I started looking more carefully at the products themselves and I understood why the conversation always went that way: because the ear, eye and oral care category—across most of what is available to professional groomers—is where ingredient quality quietly collapses.

This is not an accusation. It is an observation built from years of reviewing hundreds of formulations, and from asking a question that sounds simple but rarely gets a satisfying answer: What is actually in this, and why?

Here is where the “ingredient gap” comes into play. A professional groomer today has access to shampoos with genuinely sophisticated formulations—pH-balanced, coat-type specific or with active botanical ingredients whose roles in the formula can be clearly explained. The shampoo market is competitive enough that quality has been forced upward. Brands have to justify their formulations and groomers have learned to read labels, ask questions and notice when a product underperforms. The ear and eye care market, however, has not been put under that same pressure.

Walk into most grooming suppliers and look at the ear cleaning solutions they offer, then read the ingredient lists. You will find products where the entire formulation is described as “water, preservatives, fragrance.” You will find alcohol-based solutions used routinely on ears that are already inflamed. You will find multi-purpose wipes—sold as suitable for ears, eyes, paws and general cleaning—whose single formula cannot possibly be appropriate for all of those applications. None of this is hidden; it is right there on the label.

The problem is that most groomers are not reading ear and eye care labels with the same critical eye they bring to shampoo selection. I think this happens for a simple reason: Ear and eye care feels like a minor part of the groom. You clean the ear, you wipe the eye corners, you move on. It does not feel like a decision with the same weight as choosing which clippers to invest in. But for the animal, it very much is.

Consider what we know about canine ear anatomy. A dog’s ear canal forms an L-shape—a vertical section and a horizontal section meeting deep inside. This design means that moisture, debris and wax cannot drain as easily as it would in a human ear. So it accumulates to form a warm, moist environment that is ideal for bacteria and yeast to establish themselves.

Into this environment, groomers routinely introduce a cleaning solution. And if that solution contains alcohol (which disrupts the natural microbial balance of the ear), synthetic fragrance compounds that trigger contact irritation in already-sensitive tissue or preservatives that the animal‘s immune system flags as a foreign irritant, then the act of cleaning is not neutral. It is, in a small but real way, making things worse.

This is not rare or extreme cases—this is standard practice in many salons. The product is used simply because it is what is available, not because anyone has seriously asked whether it is appropriate for a dog whose ears are already showing early signs of inflammation.

The eye area presents a similar pattern, with some additional complications. The skin around a dog‘s eyes is among the thinnest and most reactive on their body. Products applied here— tear stain removers, wipes, topical solutions—sit in direct proximity to the eye surface. The margin for formulation error is very small. And yet this is another area where multi-purpose products dominate, and where ingredient lists frequently include compounds that would not be considered appropriate near the human eye, let alone offered to pet owners as a safe routine product.

The same ingredient gap appears in oral care. Groomers are frequently sold dental sprays or breath fresheners that rely on harsh alcohols, artificial masking agents or synthetic sweeteners. Rather than supporting the natural environment of the mouth, these products mask the problem cosmetically—and sometimes dry out the very tissue they are supposed to protect.

A dog’s mouth is not a different version of a human mouth. It has its own pH, its own microbial balance and its own needs. A formula that ignores all of this and goes for cheap chemical shortcuts is not an oral care product—it is a cover-up.

When curating products for professional groomers, I set myself a rule that turned out to be more useful than I expected: I would only approve products where I could explain the purpose of every ingredient in the formula. Not just the headline actives—the whole list.

This eliminated a large number of products very quickly. Not because they were necessarily harmful, but because the formulations did not hold up to that basic level of scrutiny. If I could not explain what a preservative system was doing and why it had been chosen over alternatives, that was telling me something about how the product had been developed—or not developed.