Grooming Kit

'Eco-Friendly' Pet Grooming Is Mostly a Marketing Word. This Line Actually Earns It.

Half the 'green' pet products on the shelf are greenwashing, right down to compostable poop bags that don't compost. A holistic groomer in Kentucky built a spa line that holds up, and it's a useful lesson in how to actually shop this category, essential-oil safety included.

By Sara Lim, Product Picks Editor

June 9, 2026 · 4 min read

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“Non-toxic.” “All-natural.” “Sustainable.” In the pet aisle, those words carry about as much binding weight as a New Year’s resolution. As ethical pet brands have gotten popular, so has the practice of borrowing their language without doing the work behind it. Plenty of products that wave the eco flag don’t hold up to a second look, and the example that should make every shopper suspicious is the compostable poop bag, a huge share of which won’t actually break down anywhere your average person can compost them.

So the useful question isn’t “does the label say green.” It’s “can the brand show its work.” One line that can is Modern Herb: Pet, and it’s worth walking through not just as a product but as a template for how to read this whole category.

A groomer who got tired of the options

Modern Herb: Pet didn’t start in a marketing department. Its founder, Desh Rain, had already been running a holistic grooming salon and boutique, Applehead City Pet, since 2013, out of Bellevue, Kentucky, a shop later billed as the country’s first all-vegan pet store. Working hands-on with dogs every day, Rain, who is also a certified animal Reiki practitioner, kept running into the same wall: almost nothing on the market checked all her boxes for how a product was sourced and made. Rather than settle, she built her own line. That origin matters, because it’s the difference between a brand that started with a mission and one that reverse-engineered a green label onto an existing product.

Inside the Sweet Sassy Lavender kit

The flagship is the Sweet Sassy Lavender spa kit, and it’s built to cover a full bath from start to finish. You get four eight-ounce bottles: a shampoo, a conditioner, a combined two-in-one for anyone who’d rather streamline (any dog dad wrangling a squirmy retriever knows the appeal), and a No Bath Spray for the dogs who treat bath time as a climbing wall, useful for a quick freshen-up or stretching the days between real washes.

Like everything in the line, the set is entirely vegan and organic, with no fillers and no synthetic chemicals. Each formula leans on a blend of plant-based oils, with lavender at the center, chosen because the plant pulls double and triple duty: it’s calming and can help soothe an anxious, jittery dog, it works as a natural deterrent for fleas and ticks, and it can ease dry, itchy skin. The eco thinking extends to the vessel, too. Instead of the usual plastic, the products come in glass, and the brand nudges you to reuse the empties as a candle holder or a bud vase rather than tossing them.

There’s a give-back layer as well. Buy any Modern Herb: Pet product carrying the “Louie Label,” and a dollar goes to LuvFurMutts, an Ohio rescue devoted to saving small breeds out of shelters where they’d otherwise be at highest risk.

The part the label won’t tell you: essential-oil safety

Here’s the caveat a responsible shopping guide owes you, because “natural” and “safe for your specific pet” are not synonyms. Essential oils, lavender included, exist on a spectrum. A properly diluted, formulated-for-pets grooming product is a very different thing from a concentrated essential oil straight from the bottle, and the concentrated stuff can genuinely harm animals, cats especially.

“The word I want people to slow down on is ‘natural,’ because it does a lot of quiet reassuring it hasn’t earned,” says Dr. Priya Nair. “A grooming product formulated and diluted for dogs is usually fine. A concentrated essential oil is a different animal, and I’ve seen pets get sick from oils applied or diffused at full strength, cats most of all. Use products made for the species, keep the raw oils locked away, and if your dog reacts to anything on their skin, rinse it off and call us.”

The practical rule: buy formulated pet products from brands that are transparent about dilution, patch-test anything new, and don’t freelance with essential oils you have around the house.

What’s new and where to buy

Modern Herb: Pet is still going, run out of the same Kentucky operation where it started, and still sells directly through its own site and Applehead City Pet rather than the big marketplaces, part of the small-batch, keep-it-close model that fits the brand’s whole pitch. If you’re shopping the category more broadly, use Modern Herb as the yardstick: a real founder story, verifiable sourcing, packaging that isn’t an afterthought, a give-back that names an actual rescue, and honesty about how its ingredients should be used. That combination, not the buzzwords on the front, is what “eco-friendly” is supposed to mean.