Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: california, carbon footprint, children, eco, eco-friendly, environment, environmental, global warming, green, greener, infants, kids, lice, los angeles, mom, mommy, organic, parenting, parents, sustainable, teens
If you have a child in school, chances are he or she will get lice at some point or another. You can be the most vigilant hair-washer on the planet, your kid could practically squeak and sparkle, but one day you’ll look over and she’ll be scratchy-scratching at her head.
I know, because two weeks ago my daughter came home with lice.
Now this is not entirely surprising. She has (had) long hair down to her waist and so thick that it took 15 minutes to brush out every morning. (Prompting a daily discussion about how kids with cancer need wigs and how much good cutting 10 inches off her mane could do and how cute she’d look with a bob, all to no avail.) And despite the tightness of my braiding, the firmness of my ponytailing and the sternness with which I lectured that she’d get lice if she didn’t keep her hair back, she always came home with it loose. Hey, if you had hair like Brooke Shields in that desert island movie, you’d probably want to let it fly, too.
But loose hair is like a highway to heaven for lice. They hop and crawl from one child’s head to another, a practice made especially easy when said child’s hair is flying around all over the place.
So she scratched. And I looked. And then I checked the Internet for photos and descriptions. Sure enough, those little yellowish dots were lice eggs. Then I freaked, remembering my sister-in-law’s 12-month battle against the things, in which she enlisted old standards like mayonnaise and petroleum jelly in an effort to avoid pesticides. Nothing worked. And taking her advice to heart, my whole mommy greenest persona went out the window as I screamed at my husband to hit the 24-hour drugstore and bring us back the biggest vat of Rid he could find.
Now if you’ve never encountered Rid before, you’re lucky. It doesn’t exactly burn, but it certainly smells like it should. And the active ingredient that kills the lice–piperonyl butoxide–is at what they call a “low hazard” for cancer and reproductive toxicity, according to the Skin Deep database (part of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which is awesome, if you haven’t checked it out already). The report also shows a 70% data gap in testing, which may be accounted for by the fact that this stuff’s been on the market for eons and probably hasn’t been tested since our grandparents used it on our parents. This also might mean that its dangers are currently under-reported, because it sure as h*ll smells like it’s more toxic than that.
But did this knowledge of toxicity stop me from slapping the shampoo on my daughter’s scalp? Not for a New York minute. Although they are small and relatively innocuous, the idea of lice is just skin-crawlingly horrifying enough to take your eco high-and-mightiness on vacation. My head itches just writing about it.
So I vigorously shampooed my daughter, my son the EcoWarrior and the Barnacle (read: baby) with Rid. And when I checked again and saw that the shampoo hadn’t killed the lice but had, in some weird Wes-Craven-inspired parenting scenario, caused the eggs to hatch so that tiny, newborn lice were actually crawling, drunk with Rid poison, on their scalps, what did I do? I shampooed them again. Longer.
But here’s the thing about lice: Once the live ones die (and they finally did, thankfully), you have to get the eggs out. If you don’t get every single little nit and one teeny tiny bug hatches one to two weeks later it can spawn seven to 10 eggs in a day and you’re right back where you started. And that’s about two hours with the nit comb if your child has (had) a mane like my daughter’s, where you go through the hair strand by strand and pull the sticky little eggs all the way down the shaft, then drown them in vinegar before you flush ‘em. Think about doing that to 10 inches of hair all the way around.
So our session with the nit comb concluded with a visit to the hairdresser’s, where my daughter walked out with a brand new, absolutely adorable bob and I walked out with the answer to my prayers: An all-natural, pesticide-free kids’ hair care line developed to combat lice. The stuff is called Fairy Tales and it’s primarily formulated with rosemary and citronella essential oils, which are lice repellents. Then there’s a treatment mousse that utilizes enzymes to combat infestations, a daily shampoo (containing sodium laureth, yes, but it’s a far cry from piperonyl butoxide), and my absolute favorite Rosemary Repel Spray and Shield, which is this yummy, essential-oil smelling stuff that you spritz on before they go to school kind of like hair spray, and it prevents the lice from taking a ride to your kids’ scalps.
Eureka! Lice is currently all over their school but my kids are not repeat offenders.
Score one for Mommy Greenest, zero for Rid.
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