Hi, I’m John Owen, co-founder of NITMIX. My wife Jacquie and I have helped thousands of parents around the world deal with their children’s head lice effectively and permanently. They’ve done it without harsh chemical pesticides, without screaming tantrums, and without horrible smells. In this report, I’m going to share our findings and our techniques so that you too can end the battles, the tears, the itching, the rashes, the blame, and the embarrassment of head lice. First, I’m going to tell you how we discovered what we now know.

The Story of NITMIX

NITMIX was created to help a mum who had already treated her son for head lice so many times that he was throwing huge tantrums if she even got the comb out.

We blended a few very gentle essential oils to help comb his hair and to slide out any head lice. It worked very well, allowing mum to "harvest" any active head lice from his hair every couple of days. In just a few sessions the supply of eggs was exhausted and the last few baby head lice were rounded up.

Word spread around the mums at school and soon we had plenty more success stories.

About 6 months later we heard from a mum, who also happened to be a Family Doctor, that her teenage daughter had not only got lice-free, but had stayed that way for months. This was quite exciting for this family as this poor girl had been plagued by case after case of head lice even when her brothers and sister weren't.

What was happening here? It turned out she was also rinsing her hair with the essential oils we had supplied – she just really liked the smell and feel of it in her hair! Could this be a clue? Well, we worked on it and tried a few different treatment regimes and watched what happened. That was way back in 1996 and 1997.

Since them we have witnessed thousands of families repeat this simple process to defeat head lice, often after struggling for weeks, months or even years.

The NITMIX Approach

These days we separate our approach to controlling head lice into two distinct steps.

Step One: Removal of Live Lice

Firstly we apply a very simple and gentle technique to checking for and removing head lice. It is best described as a harvest as we don't set out to kill head lice, just remove them from the hair. We don't mind if head lice go down the drain dead or alive, just so long as they go!

We don't attack the eggs because Mother Nature has designed eggs very well and they are very tough. But when a louse pops out of the egg after about 7 days, they become terribly vulnerable to effective combing. Combing with our NITMIX Wet Combing Aid helps catch all different sizes of head lice very quickly without exposing children to pesticides or other toxic chemicals.

Most parents have seen pictures of the big fat adult lice and concentrate on finding and removing these.

How to Spot Baby Lice

What they often don’t realised is that baby head lice are so small. They are size of a grain of sand and can be any color from clear to dark brown. When head lice hatch out, empty and hungry, they are see-through and very hard to spot. As soon as they feed on human blood they fill up and turn dark brown. As the lice digest this meal they go back through the whole range of colors to see-through, until they feed again. Parents should expect to find a whole variety of sizes and colors of lice!

When following our recommendations parents wipe their combs on a piece of white tissue paper and look at what they have caught. The big lice are easy to spot, waving their legs at you. Parents also see tiny little specs that don't move at first. But as the oils soaks into the paper these tiny dark dots get up and move about. Baby lice!

The Missing Piece of Information!

At this point most parents realise that they have been missing a vital piece of information. How could they have ever seen these tiny lice before? No matter how well they have checked the hair they could not have found these tiny lice. They certainly could not have caught them. Combing with sticky substances like conditioner and Vaseline only results in these tiny lice being stuck to the hair rather than sliding out on the comb.

When parents ask me to look at their kid’s hair and tell them if they have lice, I have to be honest and say, "I don't know!" When I oil the hair and comb it, as described above, I will know instantly whether they have lice or not. By the time I know I have already started the removal process!

With just one combing session for a family you will know exactly who has a problem and who doesn't. Then all your efforts can be concentrated in the right direction. Being this sure is a huge advantage; it saves time, money and an awful lot of stress.

Why Killing 99% of the Lice Equals Total Failure

Time after time parents come to us complaining that their child is suffering bouts of head lice every two or three weeks. Here's why.

When you use a treatment, any treatment, that claims to kill head lice and/or eggs it has to be 100% successful or it will fail completely. 99% success equals total failure. That’s quite a tough target for any drug.

Most treatments are capable of killing head lice, lots of them. But how do you know that they have killed them all, even the ones that you have to apply twice, a week apart? You have to wait and see. We have already talked about how hard it is to see baby head lice. So unless you follow up these kinds of treatments with a really effective combing session you will just have to wait for the symptoms of head lice to show themselves.

It really isn’t very satisfactory, is it?

What probably happens is that a few eggs or the odd louse survives the treatment and carries on laying more eggs until it dies. Without the right technique it is very hard to detect these tiny signs of infestation. Most parents think and hope their kids are lice free. At least for a while.

Then the eggs hatch, but the baby lice are so tiny you can't spot them. Just a week later these few lice mature into adults, and they start laying more and more eggs. But at this stage you still probably can’t see anything. Once these eggs start to hatch, the numbers add up fast. Now your kids start to scratch or complain that something isn't right. Bingo! A two to three weeks gap and another head full of lice.

Sound familiar?

The frustrating part is that had you been told how to really check for these baby lice right after that pesticide treatment, you would have got that straggler and you would have stayed clear. Success was often only one egg or louse away.

A Recap of Step One:

Get information - Correctly identify exactly who has a problem with head lice.

Take corrective action - Remove all the different sizes of lice that are active in the hair.

Receive feedback - Let you know when you have succeeded in removing all the lice.

Step Two: Make the Hair a Place Head Lice Don’t Want to Call Home

Remember way back in this message I said there were going to be two distinct steps to success? Well, I really want to share this second step with you because it will make so much difference to you and your kids.

We all smell! Yes, all humans have a natural body scent. Actually, all living creatures have a natural scent and it is used by Nature to identify us and to separate us. We all know this. Police dogs track bad guys or find missing people. Humans smell different to their pets. Some people smell nice, others less so. To most of us babies have the yummiest smell in the world!

Another wonderful thing about Nature is that she has arranged the World so that living creatures don't all have to compete with each other for the same food or places to live. Creatures seek out their ideal foods and environments so they can thrive and breed.

She may be your kid, but she smells like heaven to the lice!

Unfortunately we humans we are part of this great plan too and we get head lice, among other things, that consider us to be food and shelter.

Head lice are so keen on us that they can't actually live anywhere else!

They feed only on humans and their limbs are suited only to clambering about in our hair. Nothing else will do, just human heads. They can tell a human scalp from any other environment - if they couldn’t, they wouldn’t survive. They do this by the way we smell and taste. We have to be the right flavour or they just aren't interested. And this fact allows us to keep our children’s heads free of lice.

Change the smell, fool the lice!

Head lice are very simple creatures and not that difficult to fool. If we choose to put another smell in to our kid’s hair it can be enough to hide their natural scent so the head lice fail to colonise them and just move on.

Even if the lice visit our children’s heads, they don’t stay! So we don’t have to worry about who our children are playing with, or whose brushes or combs they’re sharing.

The new smell doesn’t have to be bad or harmful, just different. This is what we recommend to parents to reduce or eliminate future cases of head lice.

After every combing session, when washing out the remains of the NITMIX Wet Combing Aid, parents can put a little Puer NITMIX Daily Spray into the final rinse and let it dry on the hair. In the morning the hair will smell fresh and faintly of Lavender, Rosemary and Geranium, just like using a perfumed conditioner. This masks their natural scent.

Their friends won’t notice or make fun of them because it is a very gentle smell and can only be detected by putting your nose right into the hair.

If this fresh smell fades over the next few days it can be topped up using a dilute solution of NITMIX in a simple hand spray bottle. Keep it by the door with the keys so you remember!

Make no mistake, your kids will always be in contact with head lice some time, some place because it is perfectly normal. Got that?

Kids and head lice go together, always have and always will. Your school or day care is perfectly normal if the kids get lice. But you can disguise your kid’s hair with NITMIX and reduce your problems greatly.

Parent’s FAQs about Head Lice

What causes the itching and scratching?

When head lice bite us they pass a cocktail of chemicals into our skin. Unlike mosquito or flea bites we don’t generally react to these bites very quickly. We don’t get a big red itchy lump for each bite. Over a period of time, usually several weeks, our body get more sensitive to the louse bites and finally we get a soft pink rash around the back of the neck and behind the ears. Sometimes it is quite hard to see. If kids break the skin while scratching it is quite possible to get a bit of a secondary bacterial infection as well as the itch rash. These little infections normally clear up on their own.

What are the chemicals that kill head lice?

The most common active ingredients are pyrethrums, permethrins, lindane and malathion.

Pyrethrums are derived from chrysanthemums. Just because they occur in nature doesn’t make them any less concerning, Nature is more than capable of producing very powerful poisons.

Permethrin, a synthetic pyrethrin, is used to control insects on animals, house or gardens, and in agriculture. If you read the active ingredient label on wasp & hornet killer, flying insect killer, ant & roach killer, house foggers and fumigators, yard sprays, and commercial insect killers, you will see you may be applying the same chemical to your child. (Although at different concentrations depending on the product.)

Lindane is an organo-phosphate, yes that’s right the same type of chemical as used in sheep dip, nerve gas and timber treatment. In the progressive state of California it is banned outright due to concern over it’s potential to cause cancer and nerve damage while also polluting the water supply.

Malathion is another organo-phoshate produced to a drug grade (USP) which in it’s less pure form is used widely to kill Medfly and mosquitos. It is a prescription only preparation and is highly inflammable so watch out!

There is a lot of concern, information and, no doubt, mis-information about all these products.

We don’t know any more about what it true and not true, save to say, it would take a vast amount of research to sort it all out and that money is just not being spent in that way. What we do know is that parents are not getting the results they want from some of these products and that’s what counts.

When I comb my child’s hair with NITMIX, what do the different sizes, colors, and amounts of lice mean?

When you comb you can usually work out what is happening in the hair from the selection of lice that you find.

If it is just the odd large louse then these have probably just arrived from another child. Remove them quickly but watch out 7 to 10 days later just in case they laid a few eggs before you got to them.

If you find any little lice these must have been laid and hatched on this head because the baby lice don’t travel from head to head. This infestation has been going on a while.
A mixture of sizes means that you have a full blown case of head lice and you will need to remove the adults now and then capture the babies over the next week or so as they pop out of the eggs.

My child has head lice. Do I need to fumigate the house, furniture, and linens?

Please don’t knock yourselves out cleaning everything you own a hundred times. Head lice live on heads so concentrate your efforts there. Wash sheets and pillowcases in the normal wash cycle and don’t let the kids sleep together in the same bed or share hair stuff, but that’s about all. Head lice don’t generally fall off the head and eggs certainly don’t. Without the warmth of your body and you as food they die within a couple of days. If the kids have toys you can’t wash just put them in a plastic bag and pop them in the freezer overnight, job done.

Some parents tell me they had the head lice problem once and just went to the pharmacy and got some stuff and it was over. Should I believe them? Should I listen to them?

It may be true – for them. It doesn’t mean that it’s true for your child.

Some kids have a particular scent that means they get head lice every time they come into contact with them. Just like some kids are always bitten by bugs in the summer. I know from bitter experience because my younger daughter suffered head lice like the plague while her sister never had them. If your kids have this kind of scent, they will suffer and suffer until you disguise it.

So your experience with head lice is the only experience that is relevant to you. If you have struggled more than others don’t feel bad, please. Your situation will get very much better soon.

I’m worried about other parents criticizing me for not buying the chemicals that kill lice. They seem to feel that I’m not taking action or looking after my kids properly. What should I tell them?

Understand that head lice have become a big problem for them, and they will do anything to avoid having to deal with them again. You can try to educate them, give them a little NITMIX and explain the facts of head lice, and get your own kids lice-free and let the results speak for themselves. Probably the best thing to do, if you can, is empathize and remember how you felt before you discovered the simple truth about head lice and how to control them.

Some Final Thoughts

NITMIX is not a miracle or a guarantee that you will never see another head louse. It is a simple, reliable set of ideas, explanations and tools that mean head lice are reduced to a simple little problem that you can cope with easily and painlessly.

No more fighting, no more harmful chemicals, no more finger-pointing and social embarrassment. Just another part of the wonderful experience of… having kids!

Good luck,

John Owen

NITMIX
P.O. Box 5605
Loughborough
LE12 6ZD
UK

e-mail: jowen@nitmix.com

phone/fax: 44 (0)1509 856177

P.S. For much more information, case studies, testimonials from real parents just like you, or to order NITMIX online, visit our web site, www.nitmix.com.

NITMIX is registered as a Class 1 Medical Device with the Medical Devices Agency and conforms to Council Directive 93/42/EEC of June 1993 concerning medical devices.

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