- Title Head-scratchingly addictive video shows the day to day of TikTok-famous lice technician
- Summary Rachel Maroun is the originalAustralianhead lice technician providing TikTok with some extremely satisfying nit-picking content. Rachel is a lice technician from North Australia and films herself removing lice, posting the videos to TikTok. Her most viewed video has 55.6m views, showing a colony of lice that had been left untreated for so long she had to involve youth services. Many of her followers ask in the comments section how she got into her unusual job as a teenager. Rachel said: I didnt even know lice clinics in Australia existed, I think the job just chose me. I was 15, maybe 16 years old and I applied at a pharmacy. Her videos blew up online when she began filming herself bringing the comb up to the camera, letting her followers inspect the brown mass of lice she had caught. Rachels following increases when she posts content squeezing the eggs and blood out of the lice some followers even request thatshe crushes the bugs under a glass to give the satisfying pop noise. I never knew this kind of world was out there. There's such a stigma around it [having head lice] and people think its such a disgusting thing. A lot of people think Im very weird about the situation, but I think it offers people perspective on something they dont see. Rachel can see up to six clients per day, combing out hundreds of lice and eggs. In one of her videos, she douses a girls head in conditioner so the comb glides through her hair, scraping out layers of lice poo to show her followers. Their signature treatment including the heat machine and a comb through costs $150 (£79.) She said she can usually rid a client of lice in a maximum if three treatments costing up to $450 (£237.) Before she starts combing out the lice, the most important stage of the bespoke treatment is dehydrating the bugs. She revealed that many of the lice she combs out in her videos are already dead before being removed from the hair. The lice are killed first by a heat machine positioned over the clients head, which she rarely shows in her videos. Rachel said: I never show the heat machine so people dont get to see the science behind it. The popping is just the by-product of the magic thats happening before. It super dries them, its the only thing on the market that really kills the eggs. It turns the lice into little flat, dry, crispy things. Half of them fall out, the rest I comb out. Choosing such a niche career path wasnt easy. She's faced criticism from family and friends who ask her not to discuss her work in front of them. When it comes to old clients, they praise her for her work and even think that the company she works for, Lice Clinics of Australia , should expand. I have some clients who moved to England and they told me, we need your clinics over here. Rachel has some bug bears of her own, from the stigma around catching head lice, to unruly clients. We always say: come in with dry, brushed hair. You always have that one really frustrating client whose hair isnt brush-able. If theres extreme matting and youre working with huge knots of lice you cant touch it. In these extreme cases, the last resort is shaving the clients head. Many of Rachels videos are flagged by TikTok for breaching rules against animal cruelty. Multiple videos taken down for this reason and has to regularly appeal her videos that are flagged as showing graphic content. Its so weird to see people online go crazy over something that is so normal to me. Rachel recalls one lice-infested client, an eight-year-old girl whose father told her to give her back to me when shes done. You couldnt see a single strand of hair on her head, it was encrusted with lice. When she walked into the clinic, they were falling on the floor. Because the heat machine blows air on the head, when the air stream blew onto her hair, all the lice got blown up onto the ceiling and it was raining lice for a second. In a horrifying turn of events, Rachel became infested with lice herself after the bugs were blown into the air. I remember looking up and lice were cascading into my mouth, into my shirt, into my hair. I then had to begin the comb through and I spent seven hours combing her hair. If you've been left feeling itchy from her videos, Rachel can offer some reassurance: Lice want a clean house to live in, they wont go to someone who rarely washes their hair.
- Credit ARK Media
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User IP: 125.168.253.102
Date Posted: 23rd August 2021
Categories: Cool, Global News, 3+ Min Videos, Top Picks