Friends mean business in helping families fight against lice

MadCaps Salon co-owner Karen Greenberg said she knows the feeling when it seems like lice have won the battle for a household.

Greenberg said she felt powerless when her children got lice four times in six months. Several years later, Greenberg, a family nurse practitioner, turned that hopeless feeling into a lice-fighting solution by opening MadCaps Salon in 2012 with longtime friend Jessica Knight. The mission of MadCaps is to create a lice-removal salon both children and their parents feel comfortable visiting, Greenberg and Knight said.

"We don't want [lice] to be stigmatized; almost everybody gets it," she said. "So we just created a big, open space where people will come here and have the best time they could under the circumstances."

MadCaps Salon offers unlimited snacks and iPad use for children and Wi-Fi and wine for parents. The salon uses The Shepherd Method of treatment, which combines a nontoxic enzyme spray with thorough, multiple combings to remove the lice, Knight said.

MadCaps offers a guarantee that if a client gets lice again within six weeks of being treated at the salon, the salon will do another round of treatment for free. To qualify for the guarantee, MadCaps must check the head of every client's family member since that is the most common way of spreading lice, Greenberg said.

Regardless of whether a person uses MadCaps' treatment, Knight said the salon is interested in educating everyone about how to prevent and get rid of lice.

"It's just a really desperate feeling the first time you look down on your kid's head and think, 'Oh my god, there are bugs on there,'" Knight said. "We are happy to educate anyone and let them know [getting lice] is not unusual."

MadCaps Salon, 711 W. 38th St., Ste. C-7, 512-452-5423, www.madcapssalon.com