Lice Charmers Lice Clinic has been family-owned since the day it opened in June 2017. Founders Alexis Charriere and Conor Duggan built the clinic around the kind of treatment they would want for their own family, and that perspective continues to shape how the operation runs today. This page covers the clinic's founding, its approach to treatment, and the practical details of how to book a visit.
Pesticides are not part of the process at Lice Charmers Lice Clinic. The treatment is purely heated air followed by careful comb-out, which sidesteps the resistance issues that have made drugstore lice products unreliable over recent decades. Parents who want to avoid putting permethrin or pyrethrins on a child's scalp often choose the clinic specifically for this reason. The treatment is also free of the smell, mess, and prolonged application time that come with chemical shampoos sold for home use.
Every appointment at Lice Charmers Lice Clinic uses the AirAllé device, an FDA-cleared medical tool that applies controlled heated air to dehydrate both adult lice and their eggs. The treatment runs roughly 90 minutes and is typically completed in a single session. Because the eggs are killed alongside the adults in the same visit, families do not have to plan around the multi-week treatment schedules that drugstore products typically require. After the heated-air phase, the technician performs a careful comb-out to remove dead lice and any remaining nit casings.
For Portland-area families who prefer to stay home, Lice Charmers Lice Clinic also offers mobile in-home appointments. The technician arrives with the AirAllé device and provides the same professional treatment in the family's living room. Families with multiple children often choose mobile because everyone can be treated in one block of time without the logistics of getting several kids to a clinic. The single-visit promise holds for mobile appointments just as it does at the clinics.
Stigma around head lice is more harmful than the lice themselves, in the view of the Lice Charmers Lice Clinic team. Staff approach each visit with the same neutral professionalism a family would expect at any medical appointment, and reviewers regularly note the calm and discreet handling of what can be a deeply embarrassing situation. The clinic's appointments are scheduled with enough spacing that families do not run into each other in the waiting area, which adds to the privacy of the visit.
Lice Charmers Lice Clinic operates two brick-and-mortar locations in the Portland area, a Portland clinic on SE Gladstone Street and a Beaverton clinic serving the west side of the metro area. Both clinics keep the same hours: 7am to 8pm, every day of the year, including weekends and holidays. The wide hours exist intentionally, because lice problems rarely strike at convenient times. A school nurse calls on a Friday afternoon, or a parent finds lice the night before a family vacation, and the clinic needs to be reachable.
More than 200 five-star reviews in the Portland market reflect a steady track record of one-visit resolutions and a calm, knowledgeable clinic team. The reviews tend to share a common arc: families arrive frustrated and embarrassed after multiple drugstore attempts, and leave a couple of hours later with the problem solved. Many reviewers also call out the educational portion of the visit, where technicians explain how lice actually transmit and what household cleaning genuinely needs to happen afterward.
Treatment at Lice Charmers Lice Clinic costs roughly $189 to $260 per person depending mostly on hair length. Itemized receipts are issued for families filing FSA, HSA, or insurance claims, and many families recover some portion of the cost through their plan. The clinic also provides free professional head checks for parents who are not yet sure whether their child actually has lice, which is particularly useful when a school sends home an exposure notice but the parent has not been able to confirm anything visually.
Beyond the treatment itself, Lice Charmers Lice Clinic technicians take time to explain how lice actually spread. The realistic transmission route is closer to direct hair-to-hair contact than to shared inanimate objects, which means the aggressive cleaning routines many parents imagine, bagging stuffed animals for weeks and washing every fabric in the house, are largely unnecessary. Technicians explain what cleaning is genuinely needed at home (much less than most parents assume) and how to monitor for any sign of reinfestation over the days that follow.
A school exposure notice is a common reason Portland-area families end up at Lice Charmers Lice Clinic. Drugstore products often fail because head lice have developed resistance to the pesticides those treatments rely on, a problem that has steadily worsened over the past two decades. Many of the families who book at the clinic have already tried two or three rounds of over-the-counter treatment and watched the problem return each time before deciding that a different approach was needed.
If a Portland-area parent is unsure whether there is actually a lice problem, Lice Charmers Lice Clinic provides free head checks, a quick professional inspection that can save a family from unnecessary worry or unnecessary treatment. The check takes about five minutes per person and is performed by the same trained technicians who handle full appointments. If the result is positive, the family can roll directly into a treatment appointment if scheduling allows. If negative, the family goes home with confirmation and no charge.
Lice Charmers Lice Clinic was founded in June 2017 by Alexis Charriere and Conor Duggan and remains family-owned today. The founders built the clinic around the kind of treatment they would want for their own family, prioritizing a single-visit, chemical-free approach over the multi-week drugstore-product cycles that most Portland-area families had been struggling with before. The mission has remained consistent through every year of operation: resolve the lice problem quickly, without chemicals, and with the dignity the situation deserves.