Facebook dad warns parents of hair tourniquets for babies

A Wichita, Kansas, father recently took to social media to warn parents of hair tourniquets, and a picture he posted of his daughter has gone viral.

In a Jan. 21 Facebook post, Scott Walker said his daughter, Molly, was “cranky and screaming” during lunch, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. As the little girl got worked up, she began to overheat, and her mother decided to remove her socks to cool her down.

Following the sock removal, her parents saw the strand of hair wrapped tightly around her toe.

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This is called a hair tourniquet, which is literally a strand of hair that, while inside a sock, unexplainably wraps around a toe so tight that it can cut through the skin and potentially cut off blood circulation,” Walker wrote. “Luckily for Molly, she has a mother with medical emergency superpowers who was able to remove the hair with tweezers and a magnifying glass within a few minutes.”

Forty-five minutes after the hair tourniquet was removed, little Molly’s toe still showed painful evidence of the hair tourniquet. Her father explained that the hair had cut through her skin.

Since the picture was posted, it has been shared nearly 25,000 times and liked more than 35,000 times.

"The hair tourniquet syndrome wasn't anything I ever heard about," Scott said to TODAY.com. "When we found it was pretty stressful because any time your kid is hurt it's stressful; you feel helpless. I'm lucky enough to have a wife who is an awesome nurse who was able to remove the hair in minutes."

KSL.com contributor Elizabeth Reid also experienced a hair tourniquet with her own child and wrote a 2015 article regarding tips for preventing the situation.

Tips include examining a baby’s appendages and clothing, washing baby clothes separately from the rest of the family’s clothes, washing baby socks and footed pajamas inside out and suspecting hair tourniquets if your baby is fussy.