The most effective way to clean brushes after lice is to soak them in hot water (at least 130°F) for 5 to 10 minutes. This is the method recommended by the CDC and kills both adult lice and any eggs clinging to the bristles. The good news: lice die within two days off a human head, and eggs can’t hatch without the steady warmth of a scalp, so even a basic cleaning routine will eliminate the risk of reinfestation from your hairbrush.
The Hot Water Soak Method
Fill a pot or basin with water heated to at least 130°F (54°C). You don’t need boiling water, just hot enough that you wouldn’t comfortably put your hand in it. A kitchen thermometer helps, but water from most home taps set to their highest temperature gets close to this range. Submerge the brush completely and let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes.
Before soaking, remove all hair from the brush first. Use a fine-toothed comb, toothpick, or your fingers to pull out trapped hair, since strands can shield nits from the hot water. If the brush has a cushioned pad or rubber base, press it against the sink to push out any debris caught underneath.
This method works for most plastic and metal brushes. If you have a brush with a wooden handle or natural boar bristles, check below for alternatives, since prolonged hot water exposure can warp wood and damage natural fibers.
What About Rubbing Alcohol?
Many people assume soaking brushes in rubbing alcohol is the safest bet, but there’s actually limited evidence that isopropyl alcohol effectively kills lice on combs and brushes. Hot water is both cheaper and better supported by the research. If you want an extra layer of disinfection after the hot water soak, you can soak the brush in a lice-killing shampoo (pediculicide) for up to an hour, but this is optional rather than necessary.
Cleaning Brushes That Can’t Handle Hot Water
Wooden brushes, paddle brushes with air cushions, and brushes with natural bristles can be damaged by a 130°F soak. For these, you have two reliable options.
The simplest is the bag-and-wait method. Seal the brush in a plastic zip-top bag and leave it for two weeks. Any adult lice on the brush will die within two days without a blood meal. Nits that somehow survived would hatch during this window, and the newly hatched lice would die within minutes without feeding. Two weeks covers the full lifecycle with a comfortable margin.
You can also place the sealed bag in your freezer. While there’s no single official temperature threshold published for freezing lice on brushes, sustained cold well below freezing disrupts their survival. Leave the bagged brush in the freezer for at least 24 to 48 hours to be thorough.
Why Your Brush Is Lower Risk Than You Think
It’s natural to worry about reinfestation from personal items, but lice are surprisingly fragile off the human body. Adult lice need blood meals multiple times a day and die within two days without one. Nits need the consistent heat found right next to a human scalp (around 98°F) to develop and hatch. Once they’re stuck to a brush bristle at room temperature, they usually die within a week.
A newly hatched louse must feed within minutes of being born or it dies. So even in the unlikely scenario that a nit on your brush somehow hatched, the tiny nymph would have no way to survive unless the brush happened to be pressed against someone’s scalp at that exact moment. The real transmission risk from lice is direct head-to-head contact with an infested person, not shared brushes sitting on a bathroom counter.
Cleaning Lice Combs During Treatment
If you’re using a fine-toothed nit comb during active treatment, you’ll want to clean it between passes through the hair, not just once at the end. Dip the comb in a bowl of hot water after each stroke to dislodge lice and eggs from the teeth. This keeps you from dragging caught nits back through clean sections of hair.
After the full combing session, give the nit comb the same 130°F soak for 5 to 10 minutes. Since lice treatment typically requires a second round about 7 to 10 days after the first (to catch any nymphs that hatched after the initial treatment), clean your combs and brushes after each session using the same method.
Other Items Worth Cleaning
While you’re dealing with brushes, a few other items are worth addressing. Hair ties, headbands, barrettes, and clips can all be soaked in the same basin of 130°F water. Hats, scarves, and pillowcases should go through a regular washing machine cycle with hot water and then a hot dryer cycle.
Items that can’t be washed, like stuffed animals a child sleeps with or helmet liners, can be sealed in a plastic bag for two weeks. You don’t need to fumigate your house or throw anything away. Lice can’t survive long without a human host, so time alone does most of the work for you.