The Brows Have It

Sanju Upadhyay does not care about being high brow or low brow; what is important to her is giving people better looking eyebrows.

The spa manager at Four Seasons Hotel Jakarta believes that brows are an often overlooked part of someone’s appearance.

“Getting your brows done properly can change your whole look by opening up your face and accentuating your eyes,” says the bubbly young Indian. “But if they are done too much they can make you look mean.”

 She studies a person’s face to determine how to shape the brows. “You cannot go too thin with the eyebrows for an already broad or large face, because it will make it seem even bigger,” she says.

Her specialty is threading, the Indian and Middle Eastern beauty technique of using a piece of thread to pluck the hair. While the thought of tweezing may already bring tears to your eyes, Sanju says threading is a kindler, gentler way of tidying up unruly brows.

“It shouldn’t hurt. It should just feel like a prickling sensation,” she says, adding that it is best to use cotton thread instead of synthetic to avoid irritation of the delicate skin around the eyes.

Sanju says threading can be useful for removing hair from almost any part of the body, including the upper lip for women (to avoid the stubble that comes from shaving) and excessive facial growth for men (a particularly common procedure for Indian and Middle Eastern men).

She is used to seeing people come in to the salon with botched brow jobs that give them a perpetually startled look. “Basically we clean up the brows as much as we can on a couple of visits, and wait for the hair to grow back for us to be able to shape them properly.”

It has taken years of practice for her to understand the technique. Like other trainees, she started out by threading the hair on her own legs, which was very effective in teaching her about what was painful.

Sanju then practiced on people in her neighborhood, admitting it was trial and error. Make that a lot of errors.

“I think there are some people who weren’t very happy with me. I would sometimes take off too much, or create an angled brow, which didn’t look good at all.”

That is all behind her now, and her childhood quest for creating perfect brows continues with her customers. Monobrows everywhere, right this way.

+ Bruce Emond