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Jenny Mollen has sparked backlash for getting on a flight while she was infected with head lice.
The actor, 45, shared a video of herself on the plane on Instagram on October 29 with a plastic bag over her head. She appeared to be sitting in the first-class section of the plane.
“I’m on a plane with Caroline, and she just looked at my head,” she said in the video, referring to her friend with her. “And remember when I told you last week that I said my head was itchy and I thought I was having perimenopause symptoms?”
However, she then put her face closer to the camera and said: “Guess what? I have f***ing lice.”
Mollen then claimed that while she thought she knew who she got the lice from, she didn’t want to “call that person out.”
“But she knows who she is,” the Dinner and a Movie star added, laughing. “I can’t even deal. This is insane, you guys.”
She explained the flight was “five hours” and that the plastic bag on her head came with the headphones she was given by a flight attendant. She also quipped that her friend Caroline was “afraid” of her, as the divider between their two seats went up.
“I’ve been itching for two weeks, so they’ve been living on me for two weeks,” she added about having lice.
In the comments section, Mollen’s followers criticized the author and wife of actor Jason Biggs for getting on the plane when she had head lice.
“Why are you on a plane with lice????????” one wrote, while another added: “Well I certainly would not be on a plane with untreated lice announcing it. Not cool.”
A third agreed: “Could you imagine paying for first class to get lice? I’m shook.”
“I will NEVER not wear a hoodie when I fly now !! Thank you for introducing a brand new fear of mine now – catching lice on a plane,” a fourth person wrote.
The next day, Mollen shared a video of herself getting her hair cleaned by a professional at her home, which she said was “infested with lice.”
“We’re peeling out the lice. Last night we put the shampoo on and killed everybody… There are seven of us here,” she said at the time. “Now there are dead bodies and they’re being pulled from my head.”
Although she didn’t know how she got lice, she said that her husband Biggs only had “two eggs” in his hair. Mollen and Biggs’s sons – Side, eight, and Lazlo, five – had infestations of lice in their hair.
She also referred to sitting in her plane seat when she had lice, saying “that’s a bummer” for whoever sat there next.
“I want to be clear, I didn’t know that I had lice until I was on the airplane,” she added. “I thought that I was going through perimenopause and for about three weeks I was just itching my scalp.
“Let’s just blame my husband for not looking closely enough at my head,” she added. “Because I’d said to him, ‘Do I have lice? Do you see anything? And he said, ‘No.’ Turns out I did have lice.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, “head lice often spread from one person to another by direct head-to-head contact.” It can also spread “when items of clothing are stored together.”
Along with over-the-counter or prescription medication, head lice can be treated by “combing wet hair with a fine-toothed nit comb”, to potentially “remove lice and some nits.”
