How we finally got rid of head lice — after months of everything failing
“I tried every over-the-counter treatment. I got a prescription from our doctor. I combed bugs and eggs out of my children’s hair almost every night for months.
Nothing worked. I was exhausted — physically and emotionally.
Then my husband figured out why nothing was working… and built something that finally did.”
I want to tell you our story, because you’re probably in one of two places right now: you just found lice and you’re panicking and a little disgusted — or you’ve been fighting them for weeks and you’re exhausted and out of ideas. We were both. I’ve been exactly where you are.
We have five children.
One afternoon our youngest, who was five, told me her head was itchy. I gave her a bath and washed her hair with a dandruff shampoo, thinking it was dry scalp. Afterward I was brushing out her tangles, looking closely — and I gasped. There were little bugs crawling in her hair.
She had lice. And the moment I saw them, my stomach dropped, because she shares a bed with her older sister. I checked. Sure enough, her sister had it too.
I did what everyone does. I ran to the store, bought the over-the-counter treatment and the special combs, treated both girls, and spent almost six hours picking nits. I stripped every bed in the house. We threw out the pillows and bought new ones. We treated the couches. We finally collapsed into bed past midnight thinking, that was awful, but at least it’s over.
It wasn’t over. It was barely the beginning.
A few days later, exactly like the box told me to, I treated and checked them again — and they were back. And my own head had started to itch. My husband checked me. I had nits too.
I’ve been particular about my hair my whole life, and my girls and I all have hair down to our waists. The thought of bugs living in it, and the sheer scale of combing it all out, broke something in me. We went on like that for weeks. Treat, comb, wash, repeat. They always came back.
So I called the doctor and got a prescription. Now we had the heavy-duty stuff, I thought. This would work.
It didn’t.
By then a couple of months had gone by. The lice had taken over our lives. One night I sat on the bathroom floor and sobbed. I was so close to just shaving all of our heads.
Here is what no one told me at the drugstore, and what I wish someone had: the active ingredient in most lice treatments — permethrin — barely works anymore.
Over the years, lice in most of the United States have developed resistance to it. It’s the same active ingredient in the common drugstore brands, and it’s closely related to what’s in many prescriptions. So when one fails and you “upgrade” to the next, you’re often just trying a slightly different version of the thing the lice have already learned to survive.
And there’s a second problem the treatments don’t solve: the eggs. A louse cements each egg — each nit — to the hair shaft with a glue so strong that ordinary shampoos, oils, and rinses slide right off it. Miss a few, and they hatch a week later, and the whole nightmare restarts.
My husband, Peter, spent years as an organic farmer. His whole working life had been about one stubborn question: how do you get rid of pests without poison?
So while I was crying on the bathroom floor, he was getting angry at the chemistry. He refused to keep pouring failed pesticides onto our children’s heads — and then onto mine. He wanted to know exactly why these products failed, and whether there was another way to kill an insect that didn’t depend on a poison the bug had already outsmarted.
He started working with a PhD chemist. Between his years of killing pests without chemicals and her lab, they built something completely different.
Instead of one more poison, they built a two-step system that attacks the two real problems separately:
We treated our whole family. For the first time in months, the lice and the nits came out — and this time they didn’t come back. I sprayed the furniture and the cars, ran the laundry through one more time, and it was, finally, actually over.
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I was so relieved, and so amazed it actually worked, that we decided to make it available to other families going through the same thing. That’s how LiceKiller started — in 2004, out of our own months-long ordeal.
Peter and I still run it. I still help pack the kits myself. We’ve been doing this for two decades now.
One more thing, because I remember the worst part wasn’t the bugs — it was the shame. I was mortified. I thought it meant something about us. It doesn’t. Lice don’t care if your house is spotless or your kids are clean. After it was over, I found out three of my own friends were quietly fighting it at the same time. You are not dirty, and you are not alone.
If you’re where I was — treated, re-treated, prescribed, and still finding them — I’d genuinely just like you to stop suffering. This is what worked for us when nothing else would, and it’s built to handle your hair, your home, and your laundry in one box.
Free 2-day FedEx · everything for hair, home & laundry
Lisa & Peter DudekFounders of LiceKiller · 20 years helping families clear head lice