I've got lice and I'm in the process of cleaning the house and I just realized that I need to clean my necklaces. How should I go about this?

Maybe dip them in a dish of Isopropyl Alcohol? Maybe there’s a way to do this without taking them off?!

take this on a case by case basis… hang them straight and dip them into pure alcohol and let soak for a bit. just be careful about what you put in (maybe test it first), the liquid might damage certain paints, etc.

When the kids brought lice from school, I never thought about cleaning my jewelry. I would just wipe it off with whatever will not hurt the jewelry. It is mostly about all of the clothes. I bugbombed the carpet areas and never had a problem. The worse was using the lice stuff on the head. My head never got it although the kids did.

@wonderingwhy GA I didn’t think about the damage issue especially with coated acrylics and the like…

I doubt you have to clean our jewelry? I have always heard youo have to constantly wash bed linens, and vacuum everything including the furniture almost daily for a few weeks while using the stuff on your hair. My girlfriend paid someone to take care of treating their hair and supercleaned everything in her house for a couple of weeks. She said it was a royal pain. She checked her children for lice daily, she looked up what to look for.

Here is the homeopathic way, pink cream rinse (any brand as long as it is pink) will apparently paralyse the critters themselves so you put it on the kids hair really thickly let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes then rinse really well, you have to do that a couple of times to get the eggs and new hatches, but it does work. I should imagine it would work with jewelry as well although I don’t think jewelry is an inviting environment for them.

sorry this is late, I just noticed it.

Here’s an idea. According to a nurse from my health department, Lice have a predictable lifespan. If you clean only a few items, then put the other stuff in plastic trash bags, and quarantine them past the end of the lifespan of any nit that should hatch out, you have saved yourself a lot of work. you can also stick your stuff in a deep freeze for a few days. This should also kill any nits, and of course, any adult lice. As I recall, the life span of a louse is about 3 weeks. Leave your stuff in quarantine for a month or more, and you have saved yourself money, hard work, and exposure to toxic chemicals.

@rooeytoo Homeopathy has nothing to do with pink cream rinse that you get off the grocer shelf. There is a homeopathic remedy for head lice, and it maybe it is pink in color, but it is a specific product that you buy for the purpose (I’ve seen it online before).

I have used cream rinse for head lice, but to do so effectively, you have to put something in it that will kill the lice. Tea tree oil is very good for this, although for people with sensitive skin should think twice. I pour a half a small bottle of tea tree oil into a bottle of cream rinse, shake it really well. It should smell very strongly. Then work it thoroughly into the hair. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes, and wash out. As mentioned above, you must interrupt their life cycle. Two months ago, I caught them from my husband’s school. I did not super-clean (I did wash the sheets because they needed them anyway), but I washed with my tea-tree oil cream rinse on a weekly basis until I didn’t itch anymore.

My sister in law lived in England for years, and she said that’s how everyone there dealt with the little critters. She said that head lice was a huge problem there, but that if she used tea tree on the kids this way on a weekly basis, they never got them.

@all: thanks for all the help! We found our last louse last Wednesday! Yay!

@snowberry – I read that “cure” years ago in organic gardening. It specifically said use pink cream rinse. It also said use any brand of pink dishwashing detergent to spray on plants instead of bug killer. I have been using both solutions for a long time and it has always worked. My motto is if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, so I stick with pink!

Well, OK. I stand corrected about the “pink” cream rinse. I agree, if it ain’t broke…

Good for you!

I wonder what’s in the pink cream rinse. You didn’t mention brand names…Is it the color do you suppose, or does it simply suffocate the little critters?

I live in Alaska so I just take things out to my balcony and leave them overnight at below freezing temperatures. Actually, that works for most things but I’ve never had lice so far. By the way, body lice cannot live more than 24 hours away from a human body.

@Don_Liston Yeah we did a lot of that (since we live in mid-eastern MN).