10 Reassuring Thoughts About Head Lice

Every year, 6 to 12 million American children will acquire head lice. Head lice are most common in young children but can also be carried by teenagers and adults. If you or your children have head lice, there are a number of important things to know about them. Listed below are 10 reassuring thoughts about head lice.

1. Come from Head-to-Head Contact

Head lice don’t spread that easily unless children touch heads together or share something such as a hat. Over 90% of head lice cases are caused by head-to-head contact.

2. It is Common

You may hear about head lice at school, or from one of your neighbors, it happens to many people. In America, there are over 70 million children and 6-12 million will get lice each year. This means that around 10% of children will get head lice at least once.

3. Not A Hygiene Issue

There is a long-time myth that people who get head lice are those who don’t have proper hygiene habits. In reality, hygiene has very little to do with your chances of getting head lice. As mentioned, head lice almost always come from head-to-head contact.

4. Pets Don’t Carry Lice

Pets cannot really spread lice to humans. Dogs commonly carry fleas, but not lice. Lice specifically need human blood in order to reproduce.

5. They Can Be Prevented

If you don’t already have lice, there are ways to prevent getting them. The best way to prevent getting lice is to educate your family on how they spread. If children don’t share hats or touch heads, they are unlikely to get lice

6. Not Dangerous

Head lice cause your scalp to become itchy but do not really play a role in spreading disease. Head lice can be quite annoying once you have them but they do not pose a threat to you or your family’s health.

7. Simple Removal Options

Once you or someone in your family have lice, there are few simple removal options. Some think that lice are near impossible to get rid of but if removal is done correctly, they can be quite simple to eradicate. If you are unsure of how to remove lice, there are numerous lice treatment centers in most cities.

8. Don’t Last Long

The overall life cycle is around 30 days for lice, but they cannot survive longer than 24 hours away from a human host. Usual treatment options usually go for 2-3 weeks to ensure that all the lice have been killed off.

9. Lice Cannot Live in Your Clothes

As mentioned, lice cannot live more than 24 hours away from their host. Therefore, lice can’t live and reproduce in a person’s home or clothes. Lice are only commonly found in hats because many people wear the same hat every day.

10. They Can’t Jump or Swim

One last reassuring thought about headlice is that they cannot jump or swim. As mentioned most cases come from head-to-head contact. So even if you are near someone who has lice, you do not need to worry about the lice jumping on to you.

Conclusion

Overall, lice can be quite annoying, but they are not as bad as some people think. Keep in mind the listed facts about lice if you or someone you know encounters them.

How Do You Find Out If You Have Lice

For those who may not be familiar with head lice, they are microscopic, wingless insects that not only leave nits (lice eggs) and other forms of infestation in your hair but also draws blood from the scalp. In most cases, head lice can resemble dandruff, and as a result, some people will try to use dandruff shampoos and similar products to get rid of them, which are usually ineffective. In this article, we will go over how to identify head lice and a few treatments that are effective when it comes to removing them from your hair.

HOW TO IDENTIFY HEAD LICE

The sooner you can identify head lice, the sooner you can take the steps necessary to get rid of them. That said, head lice are usually found directly on the scalp or around the ears. Although symptoms can vary from one person to the next, those with head lice will typically experience the following:

  • A crawling sensation on the scalp
  • An unusually itchy scalp
  • Rash around the hairline

It is important to note that head lice symptoms and the severity of those symptoms can vary depending on the type of infestation that you are struggling with, meaning whether you have nits, nymphs, or adult lice in your hair:

Nits (lice eggs) – Given their small size, typically the size of a sesame seed, nits (lice eggs) are not the easiest to detect with the naked eye. Nonetheless, they are oval-shaped eggs that can sometimes seamlessly blend in with the color of your hair. However, they can also take on a white or yellowish color, which is why they are often confused with dandruff. Head lice nits are commonly found on the first 1 or 2 inches of hair shaft closest to your scalp and are often very sticky.

Nymphs – Also known as a singular baby louse, nymphs can hatch from nits (lice eggs) and draw blood from the scalp. Nymphs will continue to grow for 9 to 12 days after they have hatched. They also tend to move quickly and will make it a point to avoid light, which can make them harder to detect. Lastly, these pesky critters can also make the scalp extremely itchy.

Adult lice – Similar to nits, adult lice are roughly the size of a sesame seed; however, they are also very much a chameleon in that they can appear lighter or darker depending on one’s hair color. Additionally, adult lice typically have 6 legs that are fitted with claws at each end, which enables them to attach to one’s hair.

Because head lice can become so deeply embedded in your hair, regular shampoos are often ineffective when it comes to getting rid of them. The best lice removal treatments include wet combing or applying synthetic or natural insecticides to your hair, which kills both the lice and their eggs. To learn more about identifying head lice and how to get rid of them, you’re encouraged to visit us online at liceliftersdfw.com.

My Coworker has Head Lice!

You can’t always control who you work with, and your coworkers can’t always control whether or not they get head lice. While most people tend to think of head lice as a kid’s problem, the truth is that you can get them at any age. You likely noticed that your coworker has head lice by seeing them scratch their head repeatedly, or you may have even seen a live bug. Either way, you need to take action to prevent the lice from spreading any further from your coworker’s hair.

Consider Speaking With Your Employer

Head lice infestations carry a stigma, and you need to tread lightly with how you handle the situation. If you are close to your coworker, you could ask them if they’ve been exposed to lice to see if they are aware of the problem. If you choose this route, then have the information for a head lice removal salon ready to help out your coworker. Alternatively, you could discreetly mention it to your manager or a member of the human resources team. They can then decide upon the best approach to ensure that you can work in a lice-free environment.

Wear Your Hair Up

In addition to picking up some lice remover, you may also want to grab some bobby pins and hair ties. Although it is not a foolproof plan, you may be able to avoid catching head lice by keeping your hair up so that it does not touch the same surfaces as your coworker.

Be Cautious With Shared Items

Certain work environments may require you to share items or areas of the room that can harbor head lice. For instance, upholstered chairs with high backs are a hot spot for nits and lice to collect. If your workplace has a gym or health center, then you need to take precautions to avoid using things such as the same towels or headwear as your coworker.

Get Your Head Checked

As an adult, it is hard to check your own head. However, it is the only way to know for sure if you picked up the infestation. The good news is that you can find places to get a lice check by a professional, and your visit is always confidential.

Remember That Lice are Treatable

If lice are found during your visit to the lice treatment center Frisco residents trust with their hair, don’t panic. The best news is that lice are treatable, and you can expect gently assistance with the removal when you work with a professional. In most cases, the issue is able to be cleared up in a single visit. You can also request a take-home kit with a comb and solution in case it happens again.

Any case of suspected head lice needs to be checked immediately. Be sure to arrange for a lice check from a professional that can spot those tiny eggs and insects before you become the next carrier in your workplace.

Secret “Therapy” for Preventing Lice

As with most problems, a head lice infestation is best handled by preventing it in the first place. As a parent, you loathe the idea of having a school nurse report that your kid has lice or finding them on their head yourself when periodically checking. Since lice do seem to love the scalp of children aged from about 4 to 11, you might be interested in some prevention tips if you’ve got one or more kids in elementary school.

How They Spread

When trying to prevent the spread of anything, it’s helpful to know how that thing spreads. In the case of head lice, they don’t have wings or strong hind legs, so they can’t jump or fly. They do, however, have six legs that are ideally suited for grabbing onto and crawling along human hair. Because of this, lice primarily spread by direct head-to-head or at least hair-to-hair contact. It only takes a brief contact for a louse to cling onto a strand of your child’s hair, and then it has itself a new home. When it’s a fertilized female that does this, you’ll soon have a lot of head lice calling your head home. Another way they spread, though less often, is when your child shares the pillow, towel, hat, helmet, hairbrush or comb of a kid with lice.

Strategies to Prevent Their Spread

Right away, knowing how they spread gives you useful information to try to keep your kids from picking them up. Tell them to minimize situations or instances where their hair or head might brush against that of another kid. Part of accomplishing this is making sure to have any kids with long hair tie it up or back, so there’s less opportunity for it to come into contact with that of a kid who has lice.

You might also try spraying something on your child’s head that repels lice. At Lice Lifters of Frisco, we are a head lice treatment salon located in Frisco, Texas. Not only do we have the best head lice treatment in the Dallas area but our Lice Lifters Mint Detangler Spray is an excellent preventative product. Spraying it on your child’s head will not only make their hair more manageable, but lice can’t stand the scent of mint, so they’ll want to find a home on anyone else’s head.

What to Do When Prevention Fails

Let’s say for the sake of argument that kids are, well, kids and that they don’t listen to you when you tell them not to share another child’s brush, hat or comb or not to touch their head to that of another child. At this point, your focus necessarily shifts from prevention to lice treatment. Not to toot our own horn but our team at Lice Lifters of Frisco is hard, if not impossible, to beat when it comes to the best head lice treatment centers in Dallas.

Head Lice Treatment in the Dallas Area

As a parent, you just want any head lice infestation on your child’s head treated quickly, successfully and affordably. When this is the goal, don’t waste time and money on unproven home remedies or over-the-counter lice shampoos that use toxins that most lice have long grown immune to.

At Lice Lifters of Frisco, our lice technicians perform a head check to let you know if lice are indeed why your child has been scratching incessantly. At our head lice treatment salon near Mckinney, we employ completely safe and all-natural products and techniques to rid your kids of these parasitic pests. When you need lice treatment in the Frisco area, please contact our head lice treatment salon. We’ll get all of your infested family members lice free in a single visit and back it up with our Lice Lifters Guarantee. You can then buy our products, including our Lice Lifters Mint Detangler Spray, as a preventative against them ever making a home on your kid’s scalp again.

Parents: Here’s How to Win the War on Head Lice

Don’t get too depressed if you find out a child of yours has head lice. You may have noticed them after washing their hair, or maybe a school nurse let you know about the presence of the little critters. Whatever the reason you know or suspect they have lice, the first step is not to panic. They are annoying, but they are not dangerous. Thankfully, they don’t spread disease, but this is probably the only good thing you can say about them.

What Exactly Are Head Lice?

There are, of course, different types of lice, but head lice are about the size of a sesame seed and are anywhere from light tan to dark brown in color. They feed off blood underneath the human scalp, so that’s one place you’ll spot them. Their other hangout is the hair strands themselves since they have legs with claws that are suited for grabbing onto and moving along our hair. Lice need the warm, moist environment on top of our heads to incubate their eggs, or nits, and to feed. They don’t live long in the environment if they fall off their host’s head.

Some Common Ways This Problem Is Approached

For many people, Google is treated as a doctor, shaman and an all-knowing entity that can answer all of our questions. While it can give us tremendous amounts of information on a myriad of subjects, the online advice about how to handle head lice infestations varies widely from helpful to downright useless or maybe even dangerous.

There are a plethora of recommended home remedies that depend on suffocating the lice, but it’s not even known if this approach kills the lice. It is known, however, that kids hate having to sleep overnight with mayonnaise or olive oil smeared on their head. Then there’s the option of lice shampoos either grabbed off the shelf at the local store or the prescription variety you get at the pharmacy counter. Many parents don’t like these, though, since they have toxic ingredients, and the prescription variety, in particular, can run into some money. Also, and here’s the kicker, the active ingredients in many of these products have been used for so many years that most lice have grown immune them.

So, What’s a Parent to Do?

If you don’t want to waste a lot of time, money or both trying to treat a head lice infestation, then you may want to jump directly to a professional treatment. The problem with home remedies or even prescription treatments is that they leave the application of them up to you, so you’re basically on your own.

As a parent, you should be made aware that there are lice treatment centers. There are places you can bring any loved ones you know or believe have lice for the best lice treatment possible. If you live in Frisco, Denton or anywhere else in the Dallas, Texas area, there is just such a place for you to go.

Lice Treatment Center in the Dallas Area

For the best lice treatment available today, you want to bring your family to Lice Lifters of Frisco. When looking for lice removal places in Dallas, Texas and the surrounding area, you won’t find better than Lice Lifters. We use 100 percent safe and all-natural products. While they are safe for your kids, they are devastating even to the head lice that are resistant to many over-the-counter products.

When you come to our lice treatment center near Dallas, our certified lice technicians start with a head check. Once lice are definitely found, we begin our treatment process. This lice treatment, that’s convenient to families in Denton and other Dallas area cities, starts with the application of our Lice Lifters Mousse that stuns the live lice and softens the glue-like substance holding the nits to your child’s hair strands. This is followed by a thorough comb-out with our professional lice comb and then topped off with the application of a powerful killing agent to finish off any stragglers.

Don’t let your children suffer from the itching and discomfort of lice. Contact us for an appointment at our lice treatment center near Dallas for the best lice treatment in Texas.

Facts You Didn’t Know About Lice Removal

Lice Treatment Richardson, TXWe see a lot of the same misconceptions regarding lice removal from our Dallas clients. So we want to take to time to address some of these in this article.

In this article, Lice Lifters shares some facts you didn’t know about lice removal.

OTC Methods Aren’t Always Successful

Aside from the fact many over the counter treatments contain chemicals that can irritate the skin or cause other health issues, they aren’t always successful in taking care of both head lice and nits. Many of our clients try an at-home treatment and see partial success before coming to Lice Lifters to eradicate the rests.

You Can Still Have Lice Even If Your Scalp Doesn’t Itch

From what we’ve seen, only about 50% of people infected with head lice experience any kind of itching on their scalp. That means that an equal amount of people experience no itchiness but still need treatment to eradicate their head lice. So stop by for one of our head checks if you think you or your kids may be dealing with head lice.

Lice Can Only Live on the Human Scalp

Head lice cannot live on your household pets. So don’t worry about your kids getting lice from your dog or cat. They can only receive them from head-to-head contact with another human. That being said, lice can survive temporarily on other surfaces. This is why it’s often wisest not to share hair brushes or hats with other people who may be infected to prevent lice.

Call Lice Lifters to Learn More

At Lice Lifters, we have years of experience handling head lice and successfully administering treatments. Give us a call at 972-805-1308 with whatever questions you may have about our products and services. We offer head checks at our Dallas area location and a range of preventative options in addition to our treatments.

What’s the Difference Between Nit Removal and Lice Removal?

Lice Treatment Wylie, TXOur DFW-area clients are often curious about the difference between head lice removal and nit removal. In this article, Lice Lifters will explain the difference between the two processes and why it’s important to use treatment methods to remove both.

What is Nit Removal?

Nits are the eggs of unhatched head lice. These nits are attacked by a gluey substance to the hair strand making them difficult to remove. Nit removal is not effective is a specialized shampoo alone. In order to free the scalp of nits, it’s necessary to use a nit comb. These combs are specially designed to lift the eggs off the hair, preventing the next head lice outbreak.

What is Lice Removal?

Lice removal, on the other hand, is focused on removing the active head lice from the scalp. These are most often eradicated with a special shampoo or mousse that is formulated to remove all head lice from the individual. Lice Lifters has our own special formula that is free of harsh toxins, smells like mint (which naturally deters head lice), and is proven to remove head lice quickly and efficiently.

Why Do I Need Both?

Simply put, if you just remove the head lice, in a few weeks the nits will hatch and you’ll have to start all over again. The best way to treat head lice is to use treatments for each life stage to ensure that your head lice are gone for good.

Who Can I Call?

If someone in your family has head lice, give Lice Lifters a call at 972-805-1308. We’ll be more than happy to share our current products and services with you. Ask us whatever questions you may have about head lice and their removal, we are happy to answer any and all questions.

NO ITCH, NO LICE: FACT OR FICTION?

Often, the telltale sign that a child has contracted lice is vigorous head-scratching. It’s no wonder that infected kids itch like crazy – head lice bites can be very irritating to the scalp. Should you or your child experience this kind of discomfort, it’s a sign that head lice have taken up residence and multiplied, and it’s best to seek professional treatment immediately before the problem spreads or worsens.

But what if just one of your children is itchy, while the rest of the family seems fine? Or, your school has experienced a lice outbreak, but your children are showing no signs of scratching? While your first instinct may be to heave a sigh of relief that you’ve beat the odds, you’d be wise to proceed with caution.
professional treatment

The fact is that while many people do experience pronounced itchiness and discomfort when infected with lice, others seem relatively unbothered by the presence of these parasites. Some people’s skin is simply more sensitive to lice bites, just as skin irritants like mosquito bites or certain cosmetics can cause varying reactions in individuals.

What’s more, the life cycle of lice play into symptoms and their emergence. A louse has three life stages – egg, nymph, and adult. Once a female louse lays its eggs, or nits, it can take more than a week for them to hatch. The nymph is an immature insect that takes a week to reach adulthood. Once mature, an adult louse can live up to 30 days on a human head with regular feedings of blood – yuck!

All that said – and gross out factor aside – a child can be completely symptom-free for the first week or so of infection. It can be difficult for the untrained eye to even see tiny nits attached to the hair shaft. By the time itching starts, lice are firmly established and reproducing rapidly. 

The earlier you can detect infection and start lice elimination treatment, the faster and more easily the issue can be remedied. If you’re facing risk factors such as an infected family member, friend, or classmate, don’t rely on scratching and itching for diagnosis. Carefully check the roots of your child’s hair for nits and lice, and if you’re uncertain give Lice Lifters DFW a call. A professional head check can give you the peace of mind you need, and if treatment is needed, our natural and nontoxic protocol is 100% safe for your family. At Lice Lifters DFW, we’re here to help – call 972-805-1308 or contact infodfw@licelifters.com.