Thirteen years ago, I was in graduate school, workshopping a short story, when I saw the subject line in my inbox: “Head Lice Notification.” I twisted my shoulder-length hair into a bun and immediately started itching. Having had lice earlier that year, I felt my imaginary lice itch as much as the real ones. Itching, I’d learned, was a delayed reaction to the saliva of bloodsucking parasites feeding off your scalp. By the time you were scratching, a colony had already been laying eggs for weeks. But still, some people with full infestations never itch at all, so I couldn’t trust my own head. When I opened the email and saw that the outbreak was in my oldest daughter’s third-grade class, I knew my evening belonged to the bugs.
On the way home from San Francisco State University’s campus, I stopped at Walgreens to buy combs and Nix, an over-the-counter lice treatment that claimed to kill live bugs, but not the nits that hatched and started the cycle all over again. At home, I stripped the bedding, bagged soft toys, and sealed old hairbrushes in a Ziploc bag. I had mountains of laundry on the floor and enough toxins to kill Tahoe Tessie before I picked up my kids from school and performed the painful ritual of checking their heads. I parted their hair section by section, studying their scalps for movement. After each pass with the fine-tooth comb, I wiped the teeth on a paper towel and studied the specks with a magnifying glass.
No one is happy during a comb-out: not the parent holding the comb, nor the child being asked to sit still while teeth scrape their scalp. There isn’t enough Dora the Explorer in the world to make it a pleasant experience. As I worked, I tried not to cry. My husband was in New York or Boston, and I wondered who was going to comb my hair out. Not my eight-year-old, though she would years later. (As it turns out, lice can continue into high school.)
Despite my efforts, I couldn’t be sure if we even had lice or not. The next day, another notification came, the kids kept itching, and I longed for proof that we were lice-free so I could return to the critiques of my short story. There was a solution: Hair Fairies, the professional lice-removal service with a nearby location on Fillmore Street, could provide confirmation, but removal cost a whopping $135-an-hour fee. My husband, who never combed out the kids or had lice, questioned whether the service was necessary. I assured him that it was.
This article was featured in Alta’s weekly newsletter
SUBSCRIBE
When my entire family walked into Hair Fairies, lo and behold, my children and I had lice. The trained technicians explained that the infestation was still in its early stages, which made it difficult to find. The few bugs they found were tiny nymphs, not full-grown lice, and easy to miss.
Hair Fairies uses nontoxic products and combs through hair section by section, removing lice and nits by hand. Depending on hair length and infestation severity, the process can stretch to four hours per person, and some families return for a second treatment. The 14-day guarantee applies only if every family member is screened and the protocol is followed: Keep heads apart, tie hair back, and replace or clean combs and brushes. Because Hair Fairies bills by time, longer hair and more-severe infestations may cost more if they require longer treatment. During our visit, three technicians worked on us simultaneously, and although we were out of there in just over two hours, we were billed for five hours.
Before the pandemic, Hair Fairies, a 27-year-old company, operated 15 locations nationwide. After closing 12 stores around 2020, the company regrouped around a California-focused model, growing the 3 remaining locations to 7, with all but 1 now in the Golden State. (The lone Charlotte, North Carolina, outpost remains, in part, out of loyalty to a longtime employee.) The consolidation, however, was by no means an indicator of suspected lice breeding grounds: “Californians think it’s California. San Francisco people think it’s just San Francisco,” says Hair Fairies CEO Maria Botham. “Lice really crosses all borders. It’s just everywhere.”
Hair Fairies has evolved to see the work as more than lice removal. Botham sees the company’s value not only in getting rid of lice, but in helping families feel that someone competent is taking over. “I think parents walk in feeling like they have a problem that’s insurmountable,” she tells me me. “They feel like their lives have hit a brick wall. Their households are not in order, and they’re looking for order and support.”
Hair Fairies shops are located in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, Beverly Grove in Los Angeles, and Rancho Peñasquitos in San Diego—the kinds of neighborhoods where families can afford the help. “We’re kind of like on the Fillmore of every city we’re in,” Botham says. Hair Fairies will come to your home, but such convenience comes at an even higher cost.
Now when we walk past the storefront on Fillmore, my children—in their late teens and early 20s—say, “Remember when you dragged us into that place?” They remember the service less fondly than I do. I used Hair Fairies only once. It was expensive, but it gave me what I needed: confirmation that the bugs were gone, instructions for the next outbreak, and enough calm to handle another inevitable school notification.
Over time, we learned that living with lice was part of living. We learned we could do less laundry—just the pillowcases, sheets, and anything that had touched our heads in the previous day or two. We learned, too, that even after lice were gone, they weren’t entirely gone—writing this, researching them again, I’ve been itching the whole time.•
Jennifer Lewis is the editor in chief and publisher of Red Light Lit, a small press and reading series established in 2013. She is the author of the short story collection The New Low, published by Black Lawrence Press.
