Grooming Hairless Breeds

What a Hairless is

A hairless animal has no coat to maintain and, precisely because of that, needs more routine care than most coated ones. A coat absorbs the oil the skin produces and wicks it along the hair shaft. With no coat there is nowhere for that oil to go, so it stays on the skin, collects dirt, and becomes a sticky film and blocked follicles within days.

The Sphynx is the breed most people picture. Peterbalds, Donskoys and Bambinos have the same skin. Among dogs there is the Chinese Crested, which is only partly bare, along with the Xoloitzcuintli, the Peruvian Inca Orchid and the American Hairless Terrier.

These animals are bathed on a schedule. This is the only coat type on the site where that sentence is true.

Clipping this coat

Nothing to clip. The skin produces the oil a coat would normally absorb, so these need regular bathing on a schedule that no coated animal does.

Ears and nail beds do far more work

The same oil that collects on the skin collects everywhere else that a coat would normally have managed, and two places take the brunt.

Sphynx ears produce a striking amount of dark waxy debris, considerably more than a coated cat, partly because there is no hair in the canal to slow it down. They need cleaning weekly with a cotton pad and a proper ear cleaner, never a cotton bud pushed into the canal. Left alone, it builds into a plug, and it is a common route into an ear infection.

Nail beds are the one owners miss entirely. Oil and dirt collect in the fold of skin around the base of each claw and form a brown waxy ring that hardens. It is uncomfortable, it smells, and it can become infected. Wipe around each nail bed at bath time, and clip the nails while you are there.

The same applies to any skin fold: the armpits, the neck, the groin, and on a wrinkled individual the whole body. Damp cloth, then dry.

The Chinese Crested is a special case

The Chinese Crested is not fully hairless and the breed contains two coat types that appear in the same litter.

The hairless variety has bare skin over most of the body with furnishings: a crest of long hair on the head, plumes on the tail, and socks on the feet. Those furnishings are silky, they grow continuously, and they tangle and mat exactly like any other silky coat, so a hairless Crested needs both the skin routine on this page and the brushing routine from the silky coat page.

The powderpuff variety is fully coated in a long soft double coat and needs none of the skin care at all. It is genetically the same breed and frequently the same litter, which catches new owners out.

Hairless Cresteds also carry a dental quirk worth knowing, because the gene that produces the hairlessness affects tooth development too. Missing, small or poorly shaped teeth are normal for the variety, and dental care matters more than average as a result.