Hairbrushes are a hot topic!

We never shared anything when I was growing up. My mother was a hyper germ conscious old-school nurse and she oversaw our hygiene habits like a military operation. We did not drink out of the same glass, or use the same utensil in an emergency cake eating situation. We did not put our hands into a potato chip bag (you had to pour them onto your plate). Toothbrushes! Well, without passing any judgement on others, that would have never entered my mind anyway. But we were also not allowed to share brushes. When I was little, I just thought it perfectly normal and that all families followed these same edicts. It was only later, after I began to have sleepovers, that I realized other families lived these wild and risque lives where they passed the brush around the car before they went into a restaurant or grandma's house for dinner and yes! they put their hands into the chip bag and pulled out a hot little handful of barbequed discs as if it was nothing. No alarm bells. No police were summoned.

No one asks us much about chips or drinking cups at the lice clinic, but we talk a LOT about brushes. Every day, without fail. No one has ever thought twice about brushing the hair of all 3 of their children and then their own until one of them is sitting in the clinic "winner circle" chair and we are reviewing the home care instructions. We certainly get it too. The family is running late from soccer practice to the school choral program and it seems perfectly reasonable to use the same brush. Again, until you have the whole crew in a line up with their hair in wet quadrants and clips, waiting for their bugs to be combed out, it seems perfectly reasonable to share a family brush.

What are the best practices regarding brush sharing anyway?? Since you know it is going to happen occasionally. How best not to share the lice with your loved ones? Number one would be, try not to share. Get the multi-pack on amazon and employ that black sharpie to emblazen the owner's name on their chosen brush. Just go into grandma's house with that windblown look. We know. Sometimes, that just does not work out. Which leads us to number two, if you are going to share, get everyone in the habit of making sure there is no hair in the brush BEFORE they use it and then clean the hair out AFTER they use it. If everyone does that, the likelihood of passing lice to each other via a brush goes way down. Most of the time, the majority of the time, a louse would clinging to a hair on the brush, not hanging out on the brush itself. Remove the hair, remove the bug. Now if you see a bug on the brush, you do not need to throw it away, simply take the bug off the brush.

This segues beautifully into cleaning brushes if your children do end up with lice. You do not need to throw them away, boil them, run them through the dishwasher or store them in the freezer. Start with, get the hair out while the brush is dry. You can do that with your hand or a comb. Dry is easier. Wet hair clings to a brush like a skin. You could follow up hair removal with a quick soap and water wash. That's it. You are done and ready for use. It seems too simple, right? Sometimes, things are easy. If you cannot get the hair out, for whatever reason, put the brush aside for 24 hours. Eggs on a hair that is not attached to your head (like one on a brush) are not going to hatch. Because little Lilly's head is an incubator and if the egg is not close to her scalp sharing her warmth, it will die fairly quickly. You know the bug rule; can't live off your head for more than 24 hours.

That's it. You know all the brush secrets now. Go forth with your wisdom and live a happy life.