I’m a beauty editor and I have lice. I’ve never seen people back off so quickly as when I tell them I have lice.

When I see a WhatsApp message from my children’s school appear on my phone, I feel a familiar panic.

No, they weren’t bad and needed to be removed; instead, another case of nits had been reported in my son’s first-grade class. Two days earlier, a case had also been reported in my daughter’s fourth-grade class.

In fact, lice are becoming a constant in our lives.

The texts have been sweeping through my children’s elementary school like wildfire and hardly a week has gone by without one, or both, of their teachers sending these lovely messages.

Apparently our little pocket of south-east London isn’t alone: ​​cases of head lice are reported to be on the rise around the world.

“We’re seeing an increase in lice cases across the board. Last year was very virulent, but this year it’s even worse,” says Dee Wright, founder of Hairforce (hairforceclinics.com), a lice treatment company with seven clinics across the country.

Unfortunately, our family has not emerged unscathed from this situation: so far this year, we have had lice several times. And yes, when I say “have,” I include myself.

While my daughter and son each had lice three times in the past year, I had them twice, too. Which, when you’re a 43-year-old beauty editor for whom trying to perfect self-care is part of the job, is mortifying, to say the least.

However, even keeping up with the latest hair and beauty trends has not been enough to protect me from the fact that lice can come back again and again.

When I first noticed several large lice crawling around the part of my six-year-old son’s hair earlier this year, the last thing I imagined was that I had somehow gotten nits, too.

But after asking my husband to carefully comb my shoulder-length hair as a precaution, I was horrified when he showed me the nit comb full of nits.

The word shame wasn’t enough to describe it; I know lice are a childhood rite of passage, but having them as an adult felt like a different matter.

I was furious with myself for allowing this to happen. What would people think? And worst of all, how long had they been hanging around in my hair?

So instead of spending my days researching the latest wonder skincare ingredients or luxury perfumes, I found myself Googling “how to get rid of nits.”

As someone who is lucky enough to be sent a fair amount of hair care products to test at work, I was shocked at the price of lice treatments – £15 for a 200ml bottle that might treat only a handful of heads?

Even the most sophisticated shampoos on the market have a better cost per wash and more sophisticated packaging.

The lice plague quickly began to affect my daily work as well. Like the time I was invited to a press presentation of a prestigious hair care brand and was offered a blow-dry with a top-notch stylist so sought after that getting an appointment is almost impossible for mere mortals.

Under normal circumstances, I would have had to crawl over hot coals to get this person to do my hair, so explaining to her management team of shiny twenty-somethings that I was turning down the job because I had lice was the lowest point of my career.

Of course, they kindly offered to book me another appointment when “everything was sorted”… but needless to say, that hasn’t happened and frankly, I don’t blame them.

Similarly, at the beauty event where I was offered the chance to take a selfie with a famous brand ambassador, I declined; the possibility of it going viral for all the wrong reasons was not lost on me. After endless lame excuses, I finally had to confess. And believe me, nothing can make a person take several steps back faster than telling them they have lice.

And it wasn’t just a problem at work: the maddening itching kept me up at night and didn’t help my temper.

After thinking I had successfully treated all of us, I couldn’t believe it when a few weeks later I saw lice in my daughter’s and son’s hair.

So we all spent another miserable Friday night sitting around with nit shampoo in our hair and towels over our shoulders, taking turns combing our own hair and then combing the kids’ hair. And after telling the kids to stop complaining about not liking the way the shampoo felt or the way the nit comb pulled at their hair, I didn’t feel like I could complain, even though I felt exactly the same way.

After ten collective cases, I’ve found that the best way to get rid of these bugs is to treat them all with a nit shampoo three times. Lyclear Express Treat & Protect Shampoo, which costs £15.99, is the most effective: space each treatment three days apart, use the nit comb every day in between each one, then every other day for another week.

Investing in a good quality, long-toothed, very fine-toothed nit comb is vital to collect all the eggs and lice.

Dee Wright warns that the free combs that come with most lice treatments aren’t fine enough to do the job properly. She recommends the Nitty Gritty Nit-Free Comb, £13, which she says is one of the best on the market. I’d finish with the Hedrin Protect & Go spray, £5.13

Yes, it is as laborious as it sounds. Not to mention that regular use of lice treatments makes hair look like straw, so I would be remiss of me not to recommend investing in a good conditioning hair mask to use afterwards.

Finally, make sure bugs aren’t lurking anywhere else in your home, whether in your clothes, couch, throw pillows, hairbrushes, or kids’ stuffed toys, which is what I found myself maniacally vacuuming three sets of bedding.

Now, like many parents in the UK, I’m hoping that the six weeks of summer holidays will act as some kind of switch.

But in the meantime, if you see me with my hair up in a greasy bun, I’m not going to let my standards drop, I’m going to get a lice treatment.

Likewise, if I keep my distance at a work event, I’m not avoiding you, I’m probably just nit-picking.