Britian’s Mirror is claiming Britney had head lice, which is why she shaved herself bald in the buzz heard ’round the world. The Mirror makes a lot of stuff up, and I don’t believe it. This is the only place I’ve read it, and I doubt it’s more than pure conjecture.

Troubled Britney complained to friends of a “strange itching” on her scalp before running out of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads clinic last week on Caribbean isle Antigua The 25-year-old said the bugs “totally freaked me out” and she had no choice but to lose her locks.
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Leaving LA’s Mondrian hotel, Brit was heard shuddering: “I had to get rid of the lice. They were horrible.”

A source close to Brit told us: “She thought lice were eating her hair extensions, so she decided to get rid of them as soon as possible.”

Celebrity hairdresser Jonathon Long, who tends to the tresses of Girls Aloud and Westlife, told us that if she did have the bugs Brit’s decision might not have been as crazy as it seems. He added: “It’s impossible to run a fine-tooth comb through hair with extensions so she would have found it very difficult to rid her hair of lice without drastic measures.”

Everyone knows that Britney was at the Mondrian shaving her legs by the pool and trying to swap bikinis, so it’s likely they made up this story up to sell papers. I have caught them fabricating quotes based on paparazzi photos before, so this wouldn’t surprise me. If Britney did have lice, it’s easily determined by examining her hair, now for sale at the ridiculous price of $1 million. Esther Tognazzi, who owns Esther’s haircutting where Britney popped in for a shave, is selling the nasty stuff through her website. (She tried to go the eBay route, but her auction was shut down.)

Tognazzi told Ryan Seacrest on his show that Britney’s bodyguards opened the blinds before she shaved her head in her salon so that the crouching paparazzi could get clear shots of the deed:

“I had my vertical blinds closed,” she said, “And the bodyguards … opened the blinds, supposedly to see who’s back there … and somebody got a very clear shot of her in the back of my salon.” Ryan asks if it’s possible this was all a set-up for publicity. “Do I have to answer that?”

You’ve undoubtedly heard that Britney is back in rehab, this time at the Promises facility in Malibu, which helped Ben Affleck, Robert Downey Jr., and Matthew Perry battle their addictions. Her dad drove her there after a deep conversation over Cajun food, and it looks like she’s not getting along with her mom. Promises has a swimming pool, tennis court, and “spalike levels of staff attention” and it’s not like Britney will be roughing it. The facility she checked out of after one day, Eric Clapton’s “Crossroads” on the island of Antigua, is known for being a tough rehab without a lot of amenities:

I used to live on Antigua and we knew that Crossroads was probably the toughest and most spartan of clincs in a sense the last resort for rehab. If Britney did go there and bolt because of the boot-camp facilities, no surprise.

Britney probably chose her first rehab based on the familiarity of the name and the fact that she loves that “Tears in Heaven” song. Once she learned that she’d have to rough it she hightailed it out of there, meeting the plane to Miami right before take off and begging staff at the gate to let her on.

She had to fly back to Miami in the last row of coach because first class was fully booked. It looks like first class rehab is still available for Britney, though, and hopefully she will get the drugs and narcissism out of her system.

There are pictures of Britney at rehab already, with paparazzi agencies X17 and Splash News both claiming to be the first to capture a chain-smoking, pacing, bald Britney outside the Promises facility. Jordan at Britney fansite BreatheHeavy is calling for the paparazzi to stop taking pictures of Britney while she’s trying to clean up, but that will never happen. I’m not publishing the pictures here, but it’s not out of any sympathy for Britney. I just don’t have the rights to them.

Here are screenshots of Britney’s Crossroads Diary, published just five years ago and available through Amazon. It was cowritten by Felicia Cullotta, her assistant who just wrote a letter saying she’d like to save her.