Lice, How to Prevent them and Remove them
- Great Article: Natural Remedies For Lice
From Lea Harris: “Tea Tree (and other EOs) can help to kill lice eggs, or the lice themselves, once there is contact. But adding Tea Tree to your hair products to some how repel the lice may not be effective. It can't hurt, but there is no evidence showing that Tea Tree will actually REPEL and PREVENT the lice from attaching to the hair. Once the nits are there, yes, the Tea Tree can help with killing them before they get to be lice. If there is lice, yes the Tea Tree can help to kill them off. It's sort of like hand sanitizer. It's not repelling the germs away as much as it is killing the germs on contact (thus preventing an illness – but not preventing the germs!).”
If you choose to add tea tree to your hair products anyway, you should follow the same safe dilution guidelines as you would for blending any other essential oil product and add no more than a 2% dilution. For more info on how to properly dilute, please visit the Dilution page here… Diluting Essential Oils Safely
** Please Note: The “Get Rid of Lice” recipe is not child safe due to the Rosemary. The cineole chemotype of Rosemary is what is going to make this effective to get rid of lice, but we suggest not using it until after the age of 10 due to the fact that oils high in 1,8-cineole have been known to cause respiratory issues in young children. If you have a child under the age of 10, we suggest subbing the Rosemary with Fragonia which does contain 1,8-cineole, but at a lower level so it is child safe.
Here are some articles pertaining to lice from PubMed:
* An investigation and comparison of the bioactivity of selected essential oils on human lice and house dust mites.
“Lice. Early research suggests that tea tree oil might repel lice. Also, applying a combination of lavender and tea tree oil kills lice eggs and reduces the number of live lice. It is unclear if the effects are caused by the tea tree oil alone or the combination of lavender and tea tree oil.”
* Activity of tea tree oil and nerolidol alone or in combination against Pediculus capitis (head lice) and its eggs
This shows Tea Tree works in vitro. We know Tea Tree works well once the lice is in your hair, but I was trying to make the distinction between actually repelling vs. killing once they are in the hair.
* Here is a link to thread from our FB group Using Essential Oils Safely which has a lot of replies and suggestions on how to treat and prevent lice. **
https://www.facebook.com/groups/UsingEOsSafely/permalink/1721056321487071/
