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“What’s the problem?” she
asked. To her surprise, the mother described all sorts of problems
caused by the treatments, not the lice themselves. The poor child
had been subjected to so many painful treatments, he was showing severe
behavioral problems, and would literally run away screaming at the
sight of a comb. The mother was understandably stressed, and was getting
no help from her pediatrician or the school nurse. In fact, both of
them were telling her to be tough on her son: treat the lice and ignore
his protests.
Jacquie hesitated. She said that she would
try, but had no ideas. There were some old stories in the aromatherapy
books about certain essential oils useful in treating headlice.
The books didn’t say how the oils worked, but implied that
somehow they killed the lice.
When the boy arrived, Jacquie immediately noticed
that the skin on his head was so sore, there was no way she could
touch it without causing him great pain. First she had to soothe
the skin, and only then worry about the headlice.
OK, she thought to herself. Lavender calms
children. She gently rubbed sweet almond oil scented with lavender
and a couple of other aromatherapy oils into his scalp, then was
able to comb the boy’s hair for lice. She got out a lot of
headlice in 15 minutes. They repeated this treatment three times
over the next few days, and the mother carried on from there. We
were totally surprised when the boy was pronounced louse-free within
two weeks. We figured that the oils actually were killing the little
buggers. (We later discovered that we weren’t, and that it
wasn’t at all necessary to kill them. NITMIX makes it easy
to remove them, and then makes the child’s hair into a place
the lice just don’t recognize as home anymore. It’s that
simple!)
There were a couple other inquiries from the
same Toy Library group (to our non-British friends, that’s
like a communal playgroup). Both cases were successful – Jacquie
was able to end the infestation within a couple of weeks. Through
word of mouth, Jacquie’s practice spread to include headlice
cases from the whole south of England. All were treated successfully,
and word of mouth spread even farther.
At this point we thought we were only treating
headlice – we had no concept of prevention. But one case provided
a surprising breakthrough. The elder daughter of a family friend
had been plagued by headlice for months. They hadn’t come to
us sooner because they believed so firmly in conventional medicine
(the mother was a family practitioner). Finally they asked Jacquie
for the aromatherapy mixture and started using it in sweet almond
oil. Predictably, the lice went away quickly. The daughter much
preferred the smell of the NITMIX (we had given it a name by now)
to the pesticides she had been using, and liked very much that her
hair was beautifully shiny.
A few months later, we heard a strange tale
from this family. Despite additional outbreaks at their daughter’s
school, the headlice hadn’t returned to her at all. It turned
out that the girl enjoyed the look, feel, and smell of her hair
with the NITMIX that she was secretly rinsing her hair with it,
a few drops on her comb every day.
This was our first indication that NITMIX had
long-term preventive effects.
At first we just supplied the NITMIX essential
oil mixture and told people to get their own sweet almond oil. But
we started hearing horror stories of bad almond oil that didn’t
wash out. It turned out that some products sold as sweet almond
oil actually contained mineral oil. Jacquie didn’t want to
hear any more embarrassing stories of her clients having to scrub
their children’s hair for a week to remove an oil slick. It
was then that she decided to start manufacturing and selling NITMIX
to the public, to assure the quality of the oils.
We used to bottle the NITMIX on the kitchen
table every weekend. At first we just sold it to Jacquie’s
aromatherapy students, since the quality of essential oils you can
get from health food stores is sadly not very good.
The first time we bought 100 mls of oil, we
looked at each other like we were crazy: Are we ever going to sell
this? Then we started buying liters of essential oil, which looked
like artillery shells. We opened the French windows as wide as they
could go, otherwise we’d have been knocked out by the smell.
One day John was working in the office, reading
the family section of a national newspaper, when he came upon an
article about head lice treatments. It was full of scary information,
but no alternative advice. John rang the paper, where nobody would
speak to him. In a fit of pique, he rang the competition (The Daily
Telegraph), and told the health editor that a competitor had printed
a bad article on headlice.
We had no printed material at that point, so
we sent a sample of the product. We got a short article – just
2 lines and a phone number. We were shocked when we received 75
inquiries. Then a woman’s magazine, called Woman, phoned up
and did another small story. That led to 700 inquiries. We looked
at each other, two complete amateurs who were accidentally running
a consumer product business, and said, “Oh my God. We’d
better do something about this.” We decided to let the business
die a natural death – it was too much work to build it as big
as it needed.
That was 5 years ago. When we moved from the
south of England, we figured the business would just die on its
own. But we had the phone redirected for 6 months. It kept ringing
–people were reordering, or had heard about us from friends
and were calling for more information. NITMIX wouldn’t go away.
When we first heard about the Internet, we figured that one of those
web page things would cut down on the phone calls. Then we figured
that people could print out the order form and mail it in. We started
getting inquiries and order from the US, from Canada, from Australia,
from New Zealand.
We finally started listening to the testimonials
we were receiving from our customers. We thought, Maybe this product
should be bigger than it is, because it makes a big benefit to people’s
lives. And for every person we’ve helped, there are thousands
more whom we haven’t.
So that’s where we are now. We’ve
made the commitment to share NITMIX with the world, using the internet
and word of mouth. We’re convinced that NITMIX has grown so
tremendously not because we’re such great businesspeople, but
because it has inherent worth. It is a non-toxic, gentle, safe,
effective, long-lasting, environmentally-friendly, and family-friendly
method of solving the problem of headlice and avoiding the problem
of pesticide-based headlice treatments.
Thank you for helping us spread the word.
Sincerely,
John and Jacquie Owen
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