NYP: Buzz the doorbell at 227 E. 81st St. to enter a cozy salon with red leather chairs, state-of-the-art equipment and the soothing aroma of peppermint oil.
A white curtain covers the window, while colorful stickers obscure the glass front door.
It’s not a spa discreetly tucked inside, but a Licenders hair salon, where parents of lice-infested kids can pay roughly $250 a child to turn the nitpicking over to a pro.
A generation ago, lice meant a stealthy trip to the pharmacy for a bottle of foul-smelling insecticide and a special comb to remove tiny lice eggs, called nits.
Now, New York families afflicted with lice are outsourcing to Licenders and Hair Fairies salons, or a growing roster of local “lice ladies” who make house calls or work out of their homes. MORE
Lice to meet you!
Lice Lice Baby!
Don’t even get me fuggin’ started on this! My kids have brought lice home so many times, it is unreal. The school no longer makes parents keep their kids at home until they’re clean. SAME THING WITH BEDBUGS!!! My kid had one crawling on her bookbag, and I think all the neighbors heard me screaming for her to get outside! Shake it out! Get in the tub! Used to, if they found one they would send a note home and bagged all the backpacks up in plastic.
Not anymore… One parent wants to be an ass, and it is everyone’s problem! And we live in farmland!
Welcome to the 3rd World..In your face..
In about 1962 or ’63 I remember there was a lice scare at our rural school (grades 1-8). My mom is so squeamish about bugs and rodents, she doused everyone in our family with that lice ‘shampoo’. There was such a panic in the community, you would have thought we all had the plague.
Better than the treatment my mother told me they used when she was a kid in the ’30s back in Illinois–coal oil (kerosene) and then a lye soap shampooing.
Best thing to do is cut off all the hair. Then coat the head with Vaseline.