How To Use A Head Lice Comb

Head Lice Comb

Wondering what lice comb is best or if it makes a difference? It is important to get the right kind of lice comb to get rid of head lice from your childs hair. These parasites are persistent and their removal needs to be taken seriously. Even though a head louse infestation is not a dangerous problem, it is contagious.

Hair lice are spread between people through personal contact or contact of infected objects. A louse can not jump from one host to another and neither can they fly. But, a head lice infestation is frustrating when you face it. There is a distinct social repugnance associated with having hair lice as well as the irritation of having an itchy scalp. Lice get their nourishment and live by sucking a small amount of blood from the scalp. Where they bite and suck, it causes itchy red bumps which are the cause of the irritation.

In order to remove the lice from the infected head, you will need to extract each mature louse and the nits or eggs that lice lay in the hair. Nits will appear as yellow, tan or brown tiny specks on the shaft of the hair. Right after the eggs hatch they are called nymphs and they will appear to be white or clear. Using a good quality lice comb is an essential part of a lice infestation treatment.

It helps a lot to have the hair wet when you are attempting to comb out the lice and nits. A proven best practice is to divide the hair into one inch sections and process them one at a time. Use a metal lice comb and comb the hair starting as close as possible to the hair follicle and then combing from the base to the end of the section of hair. Be sure to wipe off or rinse off the comb after each section has been combed. Continue the process going from one section of hair to the next until the whole head has been carefully completed. In seven to ten days, any eggs that were missed will hatch and become young lice so you will want to treat the hair again at that time to kill any living lice and repeat the combing process to get any newly laid nits.

Before you start combing lice and nits out of the hair, make sure you have a good quality metal lice comb. The best kind of comb for getting out all the nits will be metal and have long teeth that are finely spaced. Make sure that you get a comb that is solid metal or one where the space between the handle and the comb is carefully and thoroughly sealed. You do not want any nits hiding inside your lice comb!

Sometimes the plastic combs that come with the medicated shampoos are not fine enough or sturdy enough to be effective in removing all lice and nits since the lice eggs are attached firmly to the hair shaft and the plastic just bends around some of them. If you use a high quality comb and are diligent about combing the hair from the base to the tip and then cleaning the comb, they work very well. Lice combs are a lot simpler to use than tweezers which are used by some people to remove lice and nits. The comb is much more effective because with tweezers you have to see the lice and the nits in order to remove them which is not always possible plus it is a much more labor intensive process.

Another non-pesticide alternative and effective method of killing the living lice in the hair is to use an electric comb. The electronic lice comb uses a single AA battery. As you comb through the hair, at the moment the comb touches a living louse, it zaps the critter with a tiny electric charge that cannot be felt by the humans involved but it kills all the lice it touches. In addition, it combs the lice and the nits out of the hair. In almost all circumstances this is a much better way to get rid of lice in the hair than applying strong medications and chemicals.