How to Clean Tear Stains on a Small Dog with Eye Wipes

Tear stains do not lift off a coat like a smudge off glass. On Lulu, my seven-year-old Maltese, the mark under each eye had been building for years before I understood what I was looking at. It is damp fur that never gets a chance to dry. The moisture sits against the coat, the coat stays wet for hours, and over a few weeks the hair turns that rusty brown that makes a white dog look unkempt even when the rest of her is spotless.

I tried what people suggest. I changed her food twice. I bought a bottle at the pet store that was mostly water and fragrance. I wiped with a damp paper towel every morning for a month, and the paper towel came away brown while the fur stayed brown. None of it changed the thing that actually causes the stain, which is moisture sitting on the hair all day.

What finally helped was a two-minute routine at the same time every morning, done with a wipe gentle enough to use that often. The one I settled on is Earth Rated dog eye wipes, the unscented 70-count tub, and it has lived on my bathroom counter since May. Here is the routine in the order I actually do it, including the parts I got wrong first.

Step 1: Look at the eye before you look at the stain

Before you buy a single wipe, look at the eye itself and not the fur around it. Staining is cosmetic. Redness, swelling, an eye held half shut, a thick or green discharge, or a dog rubbing her face along the rug is not a stain, and no wipe fixes it. When one of Lulu's eyes went pink and she squinted through breakfast, I did not wipe it. I called the vet and had it looked at.

Once the eye is healthy, the stain is a grooming problem, and grooming problems respond to frequency far more than to strength. That is the whole reason a mild wipe used every morning beats a strong one used once a week. A harsh product used occasionally irritates the skin under the eye and leaves the moisture sitting there the other six days.

It also helps to know where the moisture is coming from. On a small dog with a long coat, the hair grows down toward the eye and wicks wetness along the fur instead of letting it dry. Lulu's coat comes in right at the inner corner. Whatever routine you build has to reach that corner, because that is where the brown starts.

One more rule I hold to: nothing made for people goes near the eye. Not a baby wipe, not a makeup remover pad, not a cotton ball soaked in anything. The skin there is thin, and a product that stings will teach your dog to fight the routine for months. The Earth Rated wipes are unscented, alcohol free and paraben free, formulated in consultation with a licensed veterinarian, and labeled for external use. That is about as much as I want to know about what goes on that skin.

Step 2: Attach the wipe to something you already do every morning

A routine you have to remember is a routine you will quit by the second week. Mine is tied to breakfast. Lulu will only eat when I eat, so she sits by her bowl and stares at me from about six forty while I make my toast. That stare is my reminder. I lift the Earth Rated tub off the bathroom counter, wipe, put it back, and then we both have breakfast.

The tub stays out on the counter, not in a cabinet. That is deliberate. In May I had it in the linen closet and I missed four days in a row, and the crust under her eyes came back hard enough that she rubbed at it with a paw. Visible means used.

If you are a person who needs a time to hang it on, pick one you already keep: after the morning walk, before the evening news, whenever the dog gets her dental chew. What matters is that the anchor is a thing that never moves, because the wipe itself takes twenty seconds and the remembering takes longer than the doing.

The first week is the test. Lulu is fussy about her face and always has been, and the first three mornings she turned her head away and I let her. I did one eye, gave her a sliver of the chicken I keep in the fridge, and did the other eye when she came back. By day five she sat through both. Do not turn it into a wrestling match on day one, or you will be having that same match every morning for a year.

Step 3: Wipe from the inside corner out, and use a fresh wipe for each eye

This is the part where technique matters more than people expect. Start at the inner corner, right against the nose, and sweep outward and slightly down, following the way the hair grows. One smooth pass. Do not scrub back and forth, and do not press on the eye itself. If there is a soft crust, hold the wipe against it for a second and let it loosen instead of dragging it off.

Use a separate wipe for each eye. The whole point is to move dirt and discharge away from the face, and a wipe that has already been under the left eye is not clean enough for the right one. At seventy wipes in a tub, two a day works out to a little over a month of mornings, which is a fair trade for not smearing one eye's gunk into the other.

The size of the wipe matters more than I would have guessed. The Earth Rated wipes are extra-large, five by five inches, so one covers the whole area under the eye with room to fold it over and finish with a clean surface. The smaller square wipes I used before these ran out halfway through and left me dabbing at the corner with a scrap.

One thing specific to small dogs: the inner corner tucks into the dip beside the nose, and that dip is where the crust sets hardest. Start the pass right in that dip, not in the middle of the eye, or you will be wiping the easy part and leaving the source of the problem.

Step 4: Dry the fur afterwards, because a wet wipe leaves wet hair

The first month I did this, I wiped and walked away, and I could not understand why the staining was not budging. Then it occurred to me that I was leaving the hair under her eyes damp every single morning, which is the exact condition that starts a tear stain in the first place. Now I blot the area dry before I let her go.

Blot, do not rub. Rubbing wet hair roughs up the coat and it dries in a frizz that catches the light, and then the face looks worse than it did before you started. Two or three presses is enough.

While you are there, run your fingers along the hair under the eye and check for a crust that has already hardened. Warm water on a tissue, held in place for ten seconds, will soften it. Do not pick it off with a fingernail, and do not chip at it with a comb.

I keep a folded hand towel on the bathroom counter next to the tub, and the dry corner of it does the blotting. It goes in the wash on Sundays with the kitchen towels. That is the entire equipment list: one tub of Earth Rated wipes, one towel, one tissue on the days the towel is in the laundry.

Step 5: Keep the hair under the eye short and give it a season

The wipe handles the moisture. The hair is what holds the old colour, and hair does not turn back. The brown under Lulu's eyes did not disappear because I started wiping. It faded as the stained hair grew out and the groomer cut it off, over about two months and two visits.

She goes in every eight to ten weeks for a full cut, and I ask for the hair right under the eyes to be taken short. It looks a little blunt for a week and then it blends in. A short strip there means less coat to hold moisture, and the wipe does in twenty seconds what it would otherwise take a minute to do.

Judge this on a season, not a week. If you do the daily wipe, dry the fur, and keep the hair trimmed, what you should see by six to eight weeks is not a white patch appearing but a slowing: the crust stops forming, the brown stops spreading down the muzzle, and the new hair coming in at the corner looks clean. That is the win, and it is a real one. Anything promising to erase years of stain in three days is selling you something that will not arrive.

I take a photo on the first of the month with my phone, close up, both eyes, in the same spot by the window. It sounds fussy. It is the only way I know whether the staining is genuinely improving, because I look at that dog forty times a day and I cannot see slow change. In the photos, the difference between May and July was plain.

What Else Helps

Stopping the moisture is the main lever, but it is not the only one, and a few other things in my routine pull in the same direction. The first is the bath. Lulu gets one in the kitchen sink every two to three weeks, and I use a whitening shampoo that brightens the coat generally and keeps her smelling clean on the couch for days. It is cosmetic. It does not lift tear stain, and I would not expect it to.

The second is brushing, which has nothing to do with the eyes and everything to do with the coat around them. Five or ten minutes on the folded towel on the kitchen table in the evening, working behind the ears and in the armpits in small sections, keeps the long hairs from lying across the face. A slicker brush with the flexible pins and the coated tips pulls the loose hair out before it ends up in her eyes.

The third is the sink bath itself. The face gets dried carefully afterwards, corners and all, because a wet face at bedtime is a stain by morning. I stir a small amount of shampoo into a cup of warm water rather than pouring it straight onto the coat, and I rinse twice, since leftover shampoo in the fur under the eye is its own kind of irritation.

I also stopped buying the powders and the little combs and the pads that claim to lighten the fur. I have a drawer with about four of them in it. What I would say about that drawer is that every one of those items needed a routine to work, and I did not have a routine, so I blamed the items. The routine came first. The Earth Rated tub came second, and it earned its place on the counter because it was easy enough to use twice a day.

The last thing is the face, not the fur. If your dog's eyes water because a hair or a lash is curling in, that is a groomer conversation. If they water for any other reason, that is a vet conversation. Wipes are the last step in the chain, not the first, and they work best when the eye above them is quiet.

The wipe did not erase the stain. It stopped the crust from forming, and the groomer's clippers did the rest.