combing out hair lice

Ok well this post is about reminding myself what to do and how to do it as I have an unbelieveable habit of forgetting things too quickly or only vaguely remembering.

I looked for a video on combing out hair lice on the internet to help me out and this gave me a few tips that were lacking in other written guides.

The first thing to do is to smother your dry hair in a thick conditioner.  This apparently surrounds and "stuns" but does not kill the head lice and renders them immobile for long enough for you to catch them in your comb.

You have to first comb through the hair with a normal comb to get out as many tangles as possible and make the job easier and less painful for the person being groomed.

Then you use a lice comb which is a metal comb with thick metal teeth that are very close together.  You are supposed to section off the hair and comb through each bit at a time.

The very important thing to remember is to go from as close as possible to the scalp and all the way down the hair shaft.  This removes lice and eggs.  The lice like to stay close to the scalp where they feed and they lay their eggs about an inch down the hair shaft.  So when you start from the scalp and work your way down you have the greatest chance of success.

When you have done one comb stroke you need to wipe the comb off on a tissue or paper towel.  Most of the time what you wipe off will be a whole stack of conditioner but every so often there will also be some very small specks which are brownish.  They look to me like those cyclist helmets that you see at the olympics that kind of have a long thin tail at the back.  I'm not sure if these are small lice or eggs, but ... The really big lice are bigger ....I mistook one for a flea, and the larger they are the more you can see of their "legs" or pincers.

Remember to comb starting from all parts of the scalp, including the start of the hairline at the nape of the neck and from directly behind the ears.

The other tip is to clip up the bits of hair that you have already done so that you systematically work through all the hair and don't miss any.  I don't think it matters if you do some parts more than once, but missing some is more of a problem.

I got lots of stuff today and one very major large louse. 

The tissues with lice on them can be thrown in the bin.

I will do more combing on Sunday and am hoping that there will be less of everything coming out ... indicating that we are winning the war.

I will also comb Uni's hair and get him to do mine.  I suspect that because I have been regularly using shampoo and conditioner with tea tree oil in it I have been less susceptible than everyone else ... but it would not hurt to get combed and confirm this.

Fun times ahead!

PS the lice killing stuff I have been using is nitwits lice foam and its main ingredients are tea tree oil and eucalyptus oil.  I think it has been effective but because I did not comb out the eggs the first time after using the treatment I undermined its effectiveness.