Step-by-step on using DERMagic Skin Rescue Lotion for dogs with Black Skin Disease (BSD). The protocol is straightforward and the patience is the hard part — and below, an honest account of which parts of this you can expect to change and which you can’t.
Start with a clean dog
We recommend using a bar of our organic Skin Rescue Shampoo Bar, which has sulphur florets and neem oil. It’s very effective at exfoliating, deep-cleansing, and rinses very cleanly. It’s also strongly antifungal without being harsh, and it’s the correct pH for dogs.
Bathing frequency
- Bath 1: at the start of treatment
- Bath 2: 7 days later
- Thereafter: twice per month, no more
It’s not healthy for dogs to be bathed too often — and especially not during a bout of Black Skin Disease, when the skin’s already compromised. Over-bathing strips what little defence is left.
Applying the Skin Rescue Lotion
First week
Apply the lotion twice daily. Massage it deeply into the skin until it absorbs.
More is not better. Use it the way you’d use hand lotion — just enough to cover the area and absorb, no more.
After the first week
Switch to once daily application until the skin has fully recovered.
Trim, don’t shave
Any remaining hair on the affected areas should be clipped short to make application easier. Do not shave.
You’ll often read that shaving “introduces fungus under the skin”. That isn’t accurate — but avoiding it is still the right call, for better reasons. Clipping a plush coat can leave it very slow to return, a recognised entity called post-clipping alopecia, and in a predisposed dog — Pomeranians especially — clipping may unmask Alopecia X in an animal that was heading there anyway.
The follicles aren’t destroyed and the coat does normally come back, but delayed cases can take twelve to twenty-four months. That’s a long wait for no upside.
If surgical shaving is unavoidable, look after the exposed area daily while it grows back. Skin without a coat over it has lost its protection and is vulnerable to secondary bacterial and yeast overgrowth — that’s what you’re guarding against.
Keep the lotion on the dog
We strongly recommend keeping the dog dressed in a soft t-shirt during treatment. This:
- Protects the skin from licking
- Protects against strong sunlight
- Keeps the lotion on the dog rather than on the carpet
There’s nothing in the lotion that can harm an animal if ingested — but it only works if it stays on the dog.
Timeline — what to expect
Two different things are happening here and they move on different timescales.
The skin usually settles first — less irritation, less odour, less greasiness, rust-coloured staining fading — typically over the first few weeks. That’s the secondary overgrowth clearing, and it’s the part this protocol reliably addresses.
The coat is unpredictable, and we’d rather say so. Some dogs regrow substantially, some partially, some not at all — and that’s true of every treatment for Alopecia X including the pharmaceutical ones, which relapse frequently. Where coat does return it tends to start as fine undercoat, and the darkened skin fades as hair comes back rather than flaking away.
High-quality controlled evidence for Alopecia X treatment is extremely limited, so nobody — ourselves included — can honestly give you a regrowth percentage. For what each of the alternatives actually achieves, see Alopecia X treatment: what works, what doesn’t, and why.
Bonus uses
The Skin Rescue Lotion also kills yeast in two other common trouble spots:
- In the feet — symptoms are licking the paws and rust-coloured hair between the toes. Apply the lotion to the feet daily.
- In the ears — apply a small amount with a fingertip and massage downward into the ear canal daily for a few days.
The lotion is step 2 of a four-step protocol — the bath before it and the Cell Restoration Crème after it both matter. See the full Dermagic System guide for the complete sequence.
Start the treatment
DERMagic Skin Rescue Lotion
Start the protocol — dermagic.eu →For further information or specific guidance on your dog, email customerservice@dermagic.eu or call +44 7425 388643.