American consumers can purchase most conceivable products and find someone to perform almost any task — for the right price. But until now, millions of parents across the United States each year stood dumbfounded inside drugstores after school nurses sent their children home with head lice. Head lice are the number one reason students and their parents miss work, said Maria Botham, founder and CEO of Hair Fairies. Raised by entrepreneurs, Botham said she had a niche to fill. But since lice are immune to toxic over-the-counter products, she said she focused on developing her own method: combing out head lice from children and their families and then keeping the critters away with environmentally safe products. “I thought, ‘This is a good opportunity,’” Botham said. “And if I could just nail down a manual removal process… so I developed a method.” Botham said she experimented for hours and then days in 1999 perfecting a process that removes lice and their eggs from the hair shaft. Ten years later, Botham opened her fifth Hair Fairies clinic in Bird Rock at 5727 La Jolla Blvd., using the mantra “to comfort, nurture and educate.” “It looks like a super high-end salon with top-of-the-line designs. We’ve got Game Boy DS [for kids to play], food and coffee,” Botham said. Botham trains each Hair Fairies technician for 90 days, focusing on technique and customer service, she said. “When a parent comes in, they’re frantic and nothing is landing. We take it on ourselves to comfort them and get them back to zero,” Botham said. Parents bring diagnosed children to Hair Fairies for three treatments within one-and-a-half weeks, Botham said. Technicians can also screen clients, she said. “They can come in. We can tell them if their kids have head lice or not,” Botham said. According to Botham, head lice are difficult to detect. Adult lice lay eggs called nits that are nearly invisible. And some children scratch their heads while others don’t. Botham said she started learning about lice infestation 10 years ago, when she opened her first store. Lice cannot jump from head to head and they are common in every community, Botham said. Although nits can live five to seven days off the scalp, Botham said she has witnessed uninformed parents tossing their home’s contents and then coming to Hair Fairies with infested children. “Parents think they rid their kids of lice, but even if they killed 80 percent, the other 20 percent is invisible to the eye,” she said. “Hair Fairies is about saving people money in the long run.” Schools normally screen students quarterly, said Botham, who described an infestation. “Eggs look like a translucent sesame seed and the bug looks like a flattened fly,” she said. “We see parents who spend $100 to $200 and miss a week or two of work. And then come to us and still have a problem. We want them to avoid that and come to us first.” Most insurance companies pay for at least part of Hair Fairies’ service, which is physician endorsed, according to Botham. “We run [Hair Fairies] a lot like a doctor’s office. We partner with physicians,” Botham said. “It’s not something that’s part of a physician’s routine job. They come directly to us.” According to Botham, clients visit Hair Fairies about three times for a full treatment and then return home to spray their environment, including carpets, drapes, and furniture. Botham said clients wash clothing, bedding and brushes daily. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates there are about 6 to 12 million head lice infestations in the United States each year among school children ages 3 to 11. Despite the relatively benign nature of head lice, according to the CDC, kids cannot attend school with signs of infestation, interrupting work. For more information, visit www.hairfairies.com or call (858) 459-LICE (5423).