The common braid, a French braid, a fish tail braid, or a crown braid are all excellent hair styles to keep your hair up and out of the way of others. Any braid type that keeps your hair pulled back and contained is perfect for helping to prevent your contact with head lice.
Experts do suggest however that keeping long hair pulled up and back is a good way to ward off lice and nits. If hair is out of the way it is not as easy for someone to brush up against it and pass on a louse, or a nit to find its way on a scalp.
Coconut, tea tree oil, lavender, eucalyptus, rosemary, lemon grass, and peppermint are scents popularly believed to repel lice. Using any coconut scented shampoo and conditioner is an easy way to increase your defense.
So one of the best ways to prevent head lice from spreading is to wear a very tight hairstyle. Lice are similar to monkeys on a vine. They need something to grab onto when they are moving from head to head. If hair is in a tight bun or braid, it makes it more difficult for the lice to move to another head.
Head lice adore flowing locks as it makes their attempts to travel so much easier. Just putting the hair back into a ponytail isn't enough if the ponytail swings around or is thick and bushy as this still creates the opportunity for hair to touch hair.
By comparison, the researchers found that a normal hair dryer aimed at the base of hair, divided into 20 large sections, killed 55.3% of hatched lice and 97.9% of lice eggs after 30 minutes of blow drying.
Hairspray makes it harder for the louse to grab hold. The smell of hairspray and the use of solvents (sad but true) in them can also deter creepy crawlies from finding their way in. Not to mention that if you're tying longer hair back, you've got a double whammy.
There are recent studies that show that treatment of lice with heat can be quite effective in killing head lice. Products such as Lousebuster are very effective but even a home hairdryer can successfully treat lice.
They don't stay living inside the dreads because there they have nothing to live on, they have no food. However, they can use the root zone a little further from the skin to lay eggs and breed (the baby louse is called a nit). Lice usually go to dense hairs where it's easier for them to find a hiding place.
Unfortunately, we often find head lice in braids of all sorts, and the only way to treat them successfully is to take the braids out.
Adults are not immune to head lice. In fact, if you have any close contact with children or even parents of children you can be at risk of catching them if they have them. Lice transfer primarily through head to head contact, so you would have to get close to the other person.
Use neem oil on your hair before going for a hair wash and let it rest for 20-30 minutes. Use a nit comb to remove lice and then rinse hair thoroughly. You can also infuse your shampoo with a few drops of neem oil if you'd like.
Typically, 10–15 head lice are found. The number of lice often depends on personal hygiene, for example, how often the person bathes, shampoos, or changes and washes his/her clothing.
Machine wash and dry clothing, bed linens, and other items that the infested person wore or used during the 2 days before treatment using the hot water (130°F) laundry cycle and the high heat drying cycle. Clothing and items that are not washable can be dry–cleanedORsealed in a plastic bag and stored for 2 weeks.
Head lice survive less than one or two days if they fall off the scalp and cannot feed. Head lice eggs (nits) cannot hatch and usually die within a week if they do not remain under ideal conditions of heat and humidity similar to those found close to the human scalp.
Infestation timeline
An adult louse climbs onto your hair and lays about 6 to 10 nits a day, which take about 9 days to hatch. So if you look on the scalp and see no visible adult lice and several small nits, it's likely that you've caught lice in the earlier stages and had them for less than 2 weeks.
Just like with mattresses, lice can only live on any bedding—whether it's sheets, pillows, or comforters—for 1-2 days. Without a human scalp as a source for food (blood) for longer than 1-2 days, lice cannot survive.
Do African American people get head lice? African American people can still get head lice. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) state that African American people get head lice much less frequently than other people.
The short answer is, they can't. Lice really cannot live apart from a food source for more than 24 to 48 hours and, unlike fleas and bedbugs, they don't like to live separately from their host, returning only to feast. Lice require close proximity to their host.
Lice and nits can't survive the high heat. It's true that lice and nits can't survive temperatures above 113°F (45°C). This makes them susceptible to any heat source, such as a hairdryer or the plates of a hair straightener.
Medieval folklore suggests that lard was used to try and suffocate lice and nits off of a scalp. Others propose simply keeping the hair combed through and clean was of so little a priority that no one even bothered with lice.
Kill head lice by washing infested articles in hot water (at least 140°F) and drying in a hot dryer. Items that cannot be laundered such as headgear, earphones, and bike helmets, can be placed in a plastic bag and put in a freezer. If the freezer is 5°F or lower, all lice and eggs should be dead within 10 hours.
Blow dry your child's hair. It has to be thoroughly dry down to the scalp to suffocate the lice. Expect this to take 3 times longer than normal drying.
You might think "does bleach kill lice?" Thankfully, bleach is effective for disinfecting and killing lice.
Our own experimentation has shown that lice can be doused in Lysol and survive seemingly unscathed.