We’ve had some gross visitors to this house. Thread worms (three times), all-over ringworm, scalp fungus and hand-foot-and-mouth. I’m sure there are others that I have blanked out.
But we never had nits. Not once. Until NOW. We occasionally have emails from the school saying “There’s nits in Y1” and I dutifully go through the kids’ hair but there’s nothing there except mud, sticks, leaves, bits of old crisp, glue, paint, football cards, old Cheerios, 20p coins and rubber bands.
Then I heard Kitty complaining the other day “Sam stop scratching your head! You’re shaking the sofa. It’s so ANNOYING.”
And I thought oh god, this is it. And it was. I set about him with the nit comb and the lotion and felt itchy myself for about an hour and then forgot about it until it was time to lotion and comb him again. He’s got short hair and he quite likes being combed and I don’t mind either and it’s all basically fine and I think we’ve got rid of them.
Then two days later I had to relent and admit that, yeah, I probably had nits, too. The only other time I’ve had nits was when I was 16, which seems a bit old to have them, but there you go.
I will never forget it. It was the summer term of the lower Sixth. My head had been feeling monstrously itchy for weeks and I asked my mother to have a look. “Nah you’re alright,” she said. Then, a week later, at my school’s slightly ludicrous “fashion show” where among other pretentious and insane things, professional hairstylists had somehow been blackmailed or bribed into doing our hair, I was told.
A beautiful, cool girl, probably about 26, was scraping my hair back and looping it round with gel in some kind of weird ribbon effect. She had completely ignored me up until that point and was gassing to her mate about what she’d been doing in the most recent Fashion Week. Then she went quiet for a bit and leant over and said to me, really loudly “You do know you’ve got headlice, don’t you?”
And of course I nodded in a scared way and said “Yeah.” She gave me a puzzled look and went back to doing my hair. To her credit she didn’t drop me like a spitting cobra and disappear, only to return wearing a Hazmat suit. But still, it was pretty humiliating. She was probably astounded that in this massive, old, really posh and expensive London school, teenagers were wandering about with nits.
But that’s the thing about nits – they are very levelling. And just because it’s a public school, doesn’t mean there isn’t neglect. I remember one boy in the year below me lived by himself – by himself – in a flat in Belgravia while his parents lived in Greece, and had done since he was 13. We kind of thought nothing of it, but when I think about it now it was insane. What would happen to him if he got nits?
Another boy, in the year above me, is rumoured to have smoked 20 cigarettes a day since he was 11 years old and that was the reason he was so short. Kids did drugs in the loos and turned up high to lessons; in my year there was a group of boys called “The Sticky Fingers crew” who went round stealing things. There was someone who had a flick-knife but I now can’t remember who it was.
I am always reminded of all this whenever people look at me askance because my kids go to a little hippy non-selective school where they call their teachers by their first names. (A school, by the way, that we as teenagers always made rank fun of any time it came up in conversation). The assumption with our school is that it will be very druggy during the teenage years, to which my response is that all schools are druggy at some point and teenagers are all stupid c**** at some point and you just have to hope and pray that they get to 24 sane and alive. You might as well, if you are sending them private, send them to a school where they’re not nagged 200 times a day to tuck their shirts in and it’s small enough that if anyone sparked up a dooby in the bogs, the entire school would smell it.
After I was told I had nits, I got some leave-in, overnight nit solution and dosed myself twice and that was that. There was no combing advice, as there is now. But I think the wisdom these days, 22 years later, is that lice and nits have become resistant to even really very poisonous nit solution so the trick is to lightly poison them once for good measure and then comb, comb, comb, like mad.
But, hello, have you seen my hair? I am not going through that with a metal comb. And Giles is not going to do it either. I still haven’t forgiven my mother for misdiagnosing me all those years ago so I won’t give her the pleasure of doing it.
So I sat around for a bit, feeling faintly panicky. And then out of the blue I was recommended by my friend Sarah to go to “Dee the nit lady” in Primrose Hill; she runs a nit-elimination salon in the front room of her beautiful Georgian house on St Mark’s crescent. She also has franchises all over the country.
Dee is slightly alarming and brisk on the phone and also on first meeting but by golly she’s got a good thing going there. Her front living room has 4 massage chairs in it, that you sit astride in a sort of weird Christine Keeler pose and these girls come in, wearing all-white scrub suits like mental asylum workers and purple bandanas TO KEEP THE NITS AWAY.
First job is to hoover your hair with a special nit sucker-upper to establish if you do indeed have lice. They found one. “Do you want to see it?” they said. “No!” I screamed. Then there is the heat treatment, which dehydrates any leftover nit-houses and, last of all, they spray your head all over with leave-in conditioner and meticulously comb every strand of your hair. It takes about an hour and 15 minutes (depending on how long your hair is). You go back a week later. The whole thing costs £150.
I found it utterly relaxing and wonderful and think all that scrubbing and combing has in fact done really wonderful things for my scalp, lice notwithstanding.
To find out more about Dee the nit lady, visit her website HERE.
This is not a sponsored post and my treatment was not gifted.
How about you? Do you currently have lice? What do you intend to do about it.
My kids had never had nits until the long hot summer of 2015 when we came back from France. I’d let the kids go a bit feral over the summer as we were staying in a very rural ramshackle house for 6 weeks and hardly saw a soul. I took them to the hairdresser the day before school started and was mortified to find that all three plus me had nits! I’d put the scratching down to the heat and chlorine from the pool. Hideous little things, there were thousands of them washing out once I’d poisoned them. Poor you, it still makes my head itch to think about it.
Oh I thought your post yesterday with the nit lady was an April Fools…
Anyway we’re bang on trend as 4yo was de-loused last week, the rest of us have gotten away with it.
My nieces went to a “lice salon” when they got them and it looked so nice I wanted to go, even though I didn’t have them. So nice they put the pics on FB! It seemed my sister and I had lice all the time growing up. You had to stay home from school until all the eggs were gone. Kids used to try and infect each other so they could stay home.
Shit loads of conditioner and a good nit comb. Brush through every night for a week.
I mean I would probably try the £150 thing if I didn’t live in darkest Somerset where there is no fucking chance such a place exists and if I wasn’t a poor student nurse with barely £1.50 to my name to be fair.
My girls went through a phase of continuously having them and it drive me MAD and the only thing that worked was the conditioner and the £20 comb from boots. I never got them once funnily enough. I must be really hostile.
Ha ha, I went to the same school as you (some years earlier) and am totally with you on the weird dodgy neglect that went on. Can remember one kid bringing a gun to school, and another who used to take loads of acid or speed after Neighbours every day and then go and sit on the circle line until it stopped running and they had to go to their (empty) home. Strange times.
posh neglect: it’s totally a thing
One of my children has had nits on and off for five years and it is like the Forth-fucking bridge. She has waist length wavy hair too which is a bitch to de-nit but she refuses to cut it and so I just do it in front of the telly for her. I also spent part of my year off as a matron at a very smart girls prep school (so smart most of the royal god-mothers for every single royal baby went there) and part of my job was to be the nit lady. This was the best job ever. I LOVE it.
In fact most of my life has been defined by nits. I was thrown out of a hair salon in Germany for having them when I was a teenager and then one of my sisters gave it to me when I was at university so I ended up having to de-nit myself in my tiny student bedroom in my halls.
I still spend every single one of my children’s hair appointments holding my breath waiting for the words of death but so far, god knows how, they have never been uttered. Maybe hairdressers don’t care these days and just crack on and then sterilise everything to fuck afterwards?
Oh I forgot about nits. The best stuff IME is Hedrin, which doesn’t poison the nits but suffocates them. It’s also really greasy which aids with the combing. Only disadvantage is that you then have to wash your hair about eight times to get it out.
Brilliant x
I have literally just done the nit combing ritual this evening.. I use the “shitloads of conditioner and a nitty gritty comb” method and it seems to work. We were free of them tonight (a note came back from school saying we must all treat our kids) but this seems to work for us. Do it once, thoroughly, then again two nights later and repeat if you find any more..
Poor you! We’ve avoided nits so far (9 and 7 year olds). But……. threadworms……little f*******. I now worm my kids monthly like the cat 🙈
Kitty sucks her thumb and is generally pretty grubby so keeps getting them URGH really really disgusting
Anyone else feeling itchy just reading this….?
My nit story is one time this poor girl was forced to come to brownies with leave in nit stuff on her hair. Totally humiliating.
Nits aren’t related to neglect though?
Or did you just mean, neglecting to treat it IF you got them?
Just checking. There’s such fucking stigma about the bastard things. Everyone whispers it at my school like it’s a dirty word which is so ridiculous. Kids get nits. They caught them from someone/somewhere else. Admitting your kid has them doesn’t mean everyone else gasps ‘oh, HER child is so filthy they have INVENTED NITS ON THEIR OWN SCALP AND WILL INFECT US ALL…’
Apart from in America when obviously that’s what they DO think and everyone has to stay home until clear.
I honestly thought your instagram story was an April Fool 🤣🤣🤣 and us too, we live in deepest darkest Shropshire where no worthwhile franchises ever venture. But if they did, and my kid got nits, I would damn well go there immediately!
Also, tea tree shampoo as apparently they hate the smell. Who the fuck knows if this is true?
Issie yes I mean not to treat them and let them run wild is a neglect thing – actually getting lice, as I hope I pointed out, happens no matter how bloody posh and privileged you are. I have heard that too about Tea Tree. Nitty Gritty make a repellent spray that some mums at my school spritz on every day to ward them off, and say it works
I don’t have kids, but work with them. I remember being head to head with a girl in the classroom, then catching the teachers eye as she mouthed “she’s got nits!!!”. I pulled away and suddenly there were lice EVERYWHERE. I’ve worked with kids for over 20 years and have never got them. I was told that black people cam’t catch lice from white people, (i’m black)……………….just googled it and it’s really a thing, something to do with the shape of the hair follicle. I live and work in the north east Highlands of Scotland and black kids are extremely thin on the ground, so I should be safe………………..although I haven’t stopped scratching since reading this post!
Sharon I love this story.
We used to have a nit nurse. I loooved the nit nurse. So soothing.
What’s the heat thing? My boys have had nits once or twice and I’m terrified of the day I get them. But I wonder if my excessive use of hair straighteners just burns them to death even if I DO have them….?
The cheapest conditioner slathered on, then comb and comb and comb. Watch a movie and chat. Quite bonding actually.
My hairdresser also advised a session with the hair straiteners, apparently they crackle nicely.
My friend’s father is a pharmacist and father of 7. He swore by hairspray. Nits don’t like it. His 7 never had them and so far we haven’t had it either.
The one time we had nits, we all went to the headlice people in primrose hill and loved it!
My children get worms quite often (they neither follow the laws of hygiene nor keep their fingers out of their mouths). I caught them once (I had an itchy bum for days and then it clicked and yes, when I went to the loo, there they were ACTUAL WORMS living in my poo. Oh my god. It was awful) Anyway, I am now totally obsessed with not getting worms and have ovex in the cupboard above the fridge. To ward off worms now, I preemptively dose myself with it about once a week.
Oh my word. I read this, and for a moment I almost WANTED nits so I could go and see the nit lady. But then I discovered that she has no franchises near me in the Cotswolds (I mean, we’ve got Soho Farmhouse and Daylesford, but what bloody good is that when you’ve got nits?). Anyway, I digress slightly. So, no nit lady for us. Nits please STAY AWAY. I will be following all the advice on this page in the hope of avoiding them. I like the hairspray trick….
worth a trip to London for the scalp-massage. just pretend you think you might have them
The only time my boys had nits was when we visited my sister in Japan! Having to work out how to ask for nit shampoo in the Japanese pharmacy was interesting..
I wasnt going to read this as I knew if I would I would get PTSD and possibly come out in hives but I love and totally agree with the stuff about posh schools. My two daughters are teenagers now but when they were small we were all infested with nits for a long time as certain parents didn’t treat their kids (in a private school). We are lucky in that we all have very thick and very long hair but this is not lucky when you have the dreaded (I cant even type the word again). I recall we even took them on holiday to Greece one year and we joked about what a good holiday they had had (the nits). I can confirm tea tree anything is BS it DOES NOT WORK but seem to recall Hedrin was the only one that did. I didn’t know it suffocated them how disturbing! I also remember endless combing and conditioner. I am seriously itching now and wondering if they could be back. On the school thing one of my daughters friends in junior school had to leave because her dad turned out to be a massive drug dealer who got busted and went to prison and their school is in Surbiton (The Good life?) !!! Poor girl it wasnt funny for her.
another boy in the year above me at that private school had a dad, I found out later, who was one of London’s biggest heroin dealers and was in prison for a while. the boy is now a barrister… defending mostly organised crime gang members 🙁
This is a genuinely good business idea and I wish I’d thought of it. Maybe they need a branch in East London?
I went to a terrifyingly academic all girls school, famous for hoards of great and good alumni and a raging perfectionism, anorexia and self-harm problem (No, not SPG, the other one). We had a massive nits outbreak in yeah 11, because one of my friends caught them from teaching the little kids at Hebrew school. There was mass hysteria and I had to be nit combed by my mother about 5 times before they went. It still makes me shudder.
OMG, this treatment sounds amazing! Never had nits as a child, then a year ago – discovered my 1 year old had them – caught from her brother at nursery. He was riddled with them & lucky me, I caught them too. Took us about 4 weeks of bastard combing and treatments to get rid of them. I now wash their hair with anti nit shampoo & a dab of tea tree behind the ears, seems to have kept them at bay! 🤞🏽
Me and my three sisters had nits continuously from about 1998 until 2002. We just passed them back and forth between our luxuriant, mid-back-length manes, and no amount of nit combing, chemicals and ACTUAL PEROXIDE killed the little fuckers off. My brothers never got them.
We have had them ONCE since the kids have been in school.
I’m told nits don’t like testosterone!
We tried various not lotions then was recommended Tra tree oil, added to a carrier oil (almond – or in my case sunflower) spray/pout it on, leave an hour, comb and wash out. Suffocates the mits, makes it dead easy to comb with the Nitty Gritty and leaves hair v soft. Repeat a few times, but they all seemed to die at first go. We all quite enjoyed ‘nit week’… once the itching stopped! We all have long thick hair too.