Lice salons: lousy idea or necessity? Perched in a hairdresser's chair, 9-year-old Grace Lasky raised her eyebrows as a woman slicked one of the salon's specialty products through her long, straight hair.
No, Grace wasn't getting her hair styled in the swank Chicago boutique. The woman pulling a fine-toothed comb through the girl's hair was looking for nits, the eggs laid by lice and a recurring annoyance for the third-grader.
"It sort of feels itchy," Grace said.
Experts don't agree on the usefulness of delousing salons, but that hasn't stopped them from multiplying. The traffic at the recently opened Chicago salon called Hair Fairies - The Head Lice Helpers is just one indicator of the anxiety and desperation parents feel when they hear a pupil in their child's class has head lice.
Though there's no evidence of a head-lice epidemic, the bugs have been getting harder to banish as they become increasingly resistant to prescription drugs and over-the-counter remedies, such as Nix and RID.
Throw in school policies that remove children from the classroom and fear fueled by misinformation, and manual lice removal becomes a growing business.
Nit-pickers have probably been around forever. But businesses capitalizing on the parasites have become popular in the past few years, the same time the overuse of traditional home treatments left the products noticeably less effective, experts agreed.
"Over time, the lice develop a resistance. That's what bugs do, like mosquitoes get resistant to DDT," said Dr. Barbara Frankowski, former chairwoman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on School Health.
Still, Richard Pollack, a Harvard University public health entomologist, questions the value of the dozens of delousing operations that have sprung up across the nation.
"It's not surprising to find someone doing this in any community on a word-of-mouth basis," Pollack said. "They seem to be growing like the McDonald's franchise."
Amy Graff recognized the potential for a lucrative, if somewhat unusual, business about three years ago and opened LouseCalls, which makes house calls in south Florida.
"I felt that there was a need for it here," she said. "There are a lot of head lice, and people don't really know what to do."
Penny Warner, owner of The Texas Lice Squad, said her company, which employs four in Missouri City, plans to soon open a second office. "Once the word got out, the business just boomed," she said.
