The Three Musketeers
Sanna Balsari Palsule
“Don’t forget her brows!” The creative director’s voice pierced through the commotion.
I squinted to observe Esha, the make-up artist, wielding a long black pencil with a miniature brush on the end. She attempted to coax the little brow hairs on my right eyebrow upwards. Little success for Esha. She moved onto the left eyebrow now, exerting a little more vigour this time, only to be disappointed again by their stubborness.
“They’re too tough to brush up!” she exclaimed. I was amused to hear my eyebrows receive a compliment I never had.
“Forget the texture - just remember she needs to look like Frida Kahlo!” The director shouted back. The shoot released on International Women’s Day. Who better to represent women’s empowerment than Frida Kahlo? A fearless force of nature who challenged all social convention, a feminist icon, and a permanent fixture on overpriced cushion covers sold in Pali Naka.
And yet there was a time in my life that I baulked at the mention of Frida Kahlo. Groucho Marx had the same effect, but Frida was trigger central. On the subject of doppelgängers, the more perplexing comparisons I received were “the dad from American Pie” and Sandy Cohen. Nothing is better for a teenage girl’s self confidence than facial comparisons to hairy, albeit gentle, TV dads.
The comparisons held some merit. My eyebrows, thick and untamed, had a brimming, rich life of their own. Little, angled hairs squatted on top of my brows, underneath, and in between. No one was lonely. And let’s not forget the Three Musketeers perched at the start of my left brow. They always aspired to be taller than everyone else.
But back when I was at school, Frida Kahlo was not a symbol of women’s empowerment. She was just a famous dead artist with bushy eyebrows and more mortifyingly, a visible ‘stache - a facial feature that deserves its four hundred words of digression.
Oh, the upper lip.
I can’t remember the exact year of girlhood when my mother suggested I wax it, but the memory of a scent still lingers - the burnt honey Body Shop sugaring wax. Once a month, I obediently positioned myself in front of the full length mirror in the corridor, yesterday’s Cambridge Evening News laid out to shield any spillage. My father dutifully tread up the stairs, finding a reason to rummage around the study. My mother, hovering around the microwave and ready to wage war, waited for the signal that the wax was ready: an ominous bubbling. Despite her diligence in following the instructions, the wax was always scalding.
My mother plunged the wooden spatula into the wax with ease and twirled it around until the spatula was coated in the thick waxy lacquer. She blew on the spatula five times, a comforting ritual of complete necessity, before she painted the wax into thirds onto my twitching upper lip. The cloying scent of stickiness infiltrated my nostrils while the wax felt hot and gloopy on my skin. Nothing was worse than the anticipation of the wax strip, pressed firm and even on the gloop, ready for liftoff. The right side first, the left next, and finally, the dreaded middle. On one occasion, the pain was so unbearable that I asked my mother to spare the middle. In hindsight, that would have led to a more controversial doppelgänger.
I began to leverage the upper lip sessions as an opportunity to beg my mother to do something about my eyebrows. Each time, without exception, my pleas were met with the same answer -- “You DO NOT touch your eyebrows!”
My pleas fell on deaf ears. Why could the tiny hairs on my upper lip get the boot but not my thick eyebrows?
When I tearfully recounted the Frida Kahlo comparisons I received at school, my mother would say, “these girls are just jealous as you have the ‘Brooke Shields look.’” One Google search of Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon and that explanation as a balm lost all credibility.
I was twelve years old when I reached breaking point, and took matters into my own hands. Rummaging through my father’s toilet kit, I unearthed my liberator -- the razor. I brought the razor towards my right eyebrow. My hands shook with excitement. Salvation at last. In one audacious stroke, half my right eyebrow was guillotined.
I looked like I had half a caterpillar perched on my face. Why in that moment I didn’t balance out the asymmetry still baffles me. Don’t two half eyebrows become one? Instead, I scrambled to return the razor to its original place and let down my mane of hair to hide the savagery (the perk of thick eyebrows is a thick head of hair). I left the crime scene and went downstairs to join my family at dinner.
I mumbled a few words through the meal (deep in the throes of a monosyllabic teenage phase this didn’t give much away) and as I got up from the table, I tossed my hair to the other side of my face, as I often did.
“San, did you hurt yourself?” my father whispered, trying to spare me the embarrassment. I clutched at my hair to cover the damage, but it was too late. My mother witnessed my feeble Edward Scissorhands handiwork and gasped.
“What have you done? You’ve ruined your face! Oh my god, OH MY. GOD. ”
My father remained silent. I ran to my room in floods of tears. I remember the day as Eyebrowgate.
This was one of the many events that characterised the relationship with my mother during my childhood years. Our dynamic was the epitome of a fraught teenage daughter-mother bond, part Joy Luck Club, part Freaky Friday (before the switch) There was the Geography field trip aged thirteen. Eyebrow angst level: High. Everyone was excited to be out of our dowdy school uniform for the day, and I was ready to show off my new grey cargo trousers. My mother shrieked when she saw them. “How can you sweep the floor like that?” and “Why are they so low?” Needless to say, we fought for hours and in the chaos, I missed the bus. A week later, I saw my classmates’ boyfriend wearing the same trousers outside the school gate. Safe to say I never wore them again.
And then there was the ban on wearing anything black from eleven to sixteen (a challenge for Cos). For years, my mother was of the staunch belief that “young people should only wear colour.” I rebelled by sneaking around in black dresses and tops, borrowed from the girls in my class. I thought I had gotten away with it until my mother discovered a photograph in my bedside drawer; in it, I wore a black dress.
When I think back to those years now, I understand her misguided mothering.
My mother was my fearless protector. At age nine, she found out I was being bullied by a girl in primary school. She marched straight to the headmistress’ office like a lioness protecting her cub. The headmistress made a feeble attempt to pacify her: “Sometimes in a basket, you have good apples and bad apples. Your daughter is a good apple and this girl may be a bad apple, but unfortunately we cannot do anything further about it”.
“Excuse me,” my mother said, “but my daughter is not an apple.”
I was home-schooled for a year after that.
Following Eyebrowgate, I spent many years trapped in brow purgatory. I continued to fawn over Teen Vogue models with their pencil-thin eyebrows and porcelain skin, dragging my self-esteem to the lowest of its depths. It didn’t help that I was one of only two girls of colour in the entire year. I was at that precarious stage of girlhood where one’s worth was measured by how many boys you knew, and more importantly, how many showed romantic interest in you. No boy had shown me even a modicum of romantic interest (the closest I got was aged eleven when I slow-danced to Bop, Bop Baby by Westlife at a school disco with a boy who had only agreed so that he could kiss my friend later).
In desperation, I once stooped to the dizzying lows of catfishing myself at thirteen. I created a fake MSN profile for my first boyfriend - Tom. I had caught Tom’s eye in the teenager’s section of a family cruise (I had never stepped on a boat at that point, let alone a cruise). Tom was from Italy (short for Tommaso perhaps?) and was of course drop-dead gorgeous. His profile photo had an uncanny resemblance to a young Hayden Christensen (thank you, Google). Tom joined our MSN friend group, but strangely never managed to be online at the same time as me.
The pinnacle of humiliation was a sleepover with fifteen or so girls from my class. I was fourteen years old. Eyebrow angst level: Critical. Although our class didn’t fit neatly into the high school cliques, if we had, that sleepover would have consisted of sixty per cent Plastics and forty percent Mathletes. No points for guessing which one I belonged to. As the Plastics cracked open the box of cranberry and orange Bacardi Breezers in anticipation of Truth or Dare, I opted for the tub of Ben & Jerries cookie dough. The Breezers ignited an animated, tipsy discussion with the question on everyone’s lips (except mine): Who in our class would be the first and last girl in the class to have sex (teenage proxy for who was most and least attractive)? The vote was as predictable as Sweden voting for Denmark in Eurovision and I was unanimously deemed to be the last. Popularity remained a pipe dream.
And then there was the last day of secondary school. As per tradition, all the girls signed messages on each other’s shirts which served as mementos of the five-year ordeal we spent together. Cute nicknames (does “Scanna” and “Sanny-pad” count as cute though?), inside-jokes, and heartfelt memories were documented across our white tees.
That evening I was eager to go home and pore over the messages. Emblazoned across the entire back of my shirt and impossible to ignore was “HAIRY AND PROUD.”
Hairy was one thing, but proud? Really?
And did the perpetrator really have to do it in capitals?
It was at sixteen that salvation came in the form of Inspirations Hair & Beauty. Cambridge’s first threading salon had opened a stone’s throw away and was run by Dipa, a sweet Gujarati Aunty (incidentally not in fact an Aunty; she was probably younger than I am now).
I was fizzing with excitement as my mother and I approached Dipa’s. The shop was painted a sickly shade of mint green and was nestled between a charity shop for cats and a Save the Children. The interiors reeked of the same cloying sugary wax, and three chairs were stationed in front of a long horizontal mirror. To my embarrassment, they all faced the window, allowing any passerby a clear view of my plight.
Although my mother was sure to warn Dipa to not make them “too thin” on our first visit, the little hairs on the top and bottom of my eyebrow vanished over the course of a painful ten minutes. I didn’t feel beautiful, but I felt less like a freak. It was a start.
I don’t know if my mother became fed up with the battle of the brows but by seventeen, she stopped accompanying me to Dipa’s. Without my mother’s watchful gaze, I would ask Dipa to take a tiny bit more off each time. By the time I was at university, my eyebrows were pencil thin. The Three Musketeers had been silenced.
Looking back at photographs from that time, it evokes a strange sense of detachment tinged with sadness. My face just does not seem quite right.
Things took a turn for me and the brows at twenty-one. Was it the validation from a beautiful man or was I finally growing into myself and letting go of my insecurities? Mostly the former.
He was a few years older than me and bore a dreamy likeness to a young Robert Redford (and much better looking than Tom). I met him in the kitchen of a college party where he was tending to a pot of mulled wine. I never thought someone like him would reciprocate my interest.
What followed was first love in all its glory: Love letters bound in books, romantic surprises (at a college formal, he bribed a server to place a Kinder Bueno -- my favourite chocolate -- under a cloche), and tipsy declarations of love in hostels across Europe. It was like living out an AI generated Netflix rom-com, without the dramatic turning point.
Even though Robert left Cambridge within a year of us meeting, we made long-distance work. Our golden rule was to spend every alternate weekend together, with me as the student taking up the lion’s share of the travel.
His hometown was charming - separated into an Upper and Lower Town. I spent my days hopping between the cobblestones and the concrete, scouring for cafes to work from. In those days, the city had a population of six hundred thousand with no Dipa or Inspirations Hair & Beauty in sight. Whenever I glimpsed a fellow person of colour, we acknowledged each other with a silent, sheepish nod. My eyebrows were still shunned from being their natural selves, but with no Dipa, the Three Musketeers were occasionally allowed to enjoy their panoramic view.
Those were strange years. The models of Teen Vogue were replaced with real-life visions of six feet tall Balkan women (I was often told my five feet ten and a half inches was somewhat the average), with high cheekbones and ridiculously impeccable fashion. I dreaded Saturday mornings when the city’s population would gather on the cafe-lined streets and watch the fashion show unfold (I found out during one of my language classes that this ritual even has its own word: Špica). I stuck out like a sore thumb just as I had with the Plastics, but I was too engulfed in first love fumes to feel the weight of that difference. Robert’s love became my cocoon, validating and protecting me from the external world.
One day, a man in his forties approached me in a cafe and asked if he could take a photograph. I naively mistook his fetishisation of my “big eyes and eyebrows” as flattery. He rummaged in his jacket pocket and a prehistoric Nokia emerged. Something about his gaze made me feel like a zoo animal sipping a flat white. That evening, I shared the incident with Robert and he brushed it off as curiosity and nothing else. I never felt able to share the depths of my inner turmoil with Robert, and he never seemed to really understand it.
Robert and I had been together for four years when I flew to Slovenia to meet him. I was still very much a student taking advantage of £29.99 Ryanair deals. This time I decided to take a three hour bus ride across the border. This trip took place at the height of the migrant crisis in Europe.
Arriving at the station, I spotted the bus I needed and made my way to the doors to speak to the driver. He saw me first and locked the doors from the inside.
No bus at that station let me embark that day, and eventually Robert drove across the border to pick me up. Something within me changed that day. I no longer wanted to feel the weight of difference. I realised that the cocoon which I had once needed was now stifling my sense of self.
In our fifth year together, life took an interesting turn. Thick, untamed eyebrows were the rage, and Cara Delavigne, amongst other bushy-browed women, were reigning the runway. The gentle Dad from American Pie was nominated for an Emmy.
I was on my annual family visit to Bombay when a casting agent spotted me walking through the bylanes of Bandra. A few Polaroids and a modelling contract soon followed.
Robert urged me to reconsider, fearing the strain of this new physical distance on our relationship. Unfortunately, he failed to understand my need for brown homogeny, mistaking it for the vanity of a twenty-something. I laboured over the decision for weeks but rationalised the move as an interlude, a temporary escape from a slightly colourless existence.
Life that year was an unexpected thrill. I did my first runway show, tripped at an awards ceremony in front of half of the crème de la crème of Bollywood, and learned that I was fairly adept at being a stony-faced model, but disastrous when it came to acting (a casting agent practically walked out of the room as he watched me miming cream application for a Nivea advert). A famous choreographer told me I looked like a “dead duck walking” (a peculiar insult) in one of our rehearsals, and I opened for a designer I loved. I secretly enjoyed the novelty of attention from B-list actors, and I found solace in a community of friends who understood the third culture kid in me.
As the curtain fell on that first year in Bombay, Robert and I broke up on Skype. After six years together I expected to go out with a bang, but it ended with a whimper. He felt it was time for me to move back but after some tears, I refused. The whole conversation lasted all of an hour. Like waxing, it was painful but it was quick. The loss only really hit me years later when I gave myself a chance to catch my breath.
It’s strange to think it’s now been six years since I moved to Bombay. The place is no longer as thrilling as it used to be, but it’s become a real home with all its flaws.
Long gone are Dipa visits. When I was at a salon last, the lady suggested I “clean up” my eyebrows. With a polite firmness that would make my mother proud, I responded, “Please do not touch my eyebrows.”
The brows have taken their rightful place: centre-stage. While I continue to stumble on my own path to good feminism or something that resembles self-actualisation, they arrived years before me. None of this poetic butterfly metamorphosis - they’ve left their cocoon and are content as steadfast caterpillars.
Still, they receive the occasional comment. At a wedding a few weeks ago, a guest cornered me at the buffet to tell me he liked my “natural” eyebrows - adding that he used to have a poster of Brooke Shields from Blue Lagoon on his wall as a teenager.
The Three Musketeers took a bow.
About the Author
Sanna Balsari Palsule is a psychologist, writer and Associate Professor at Ashoka University. She received her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Sanna investigates the stretch of human personality and behaviour, and has been featured by The Atlantic, BBC, World Economic Forum, New York Magazine, among others. She is also a columnist for Psychology Today. Most recently, Sanna published a board game “Who Are You?: A Science-Based Personality Game” that was released by Hachette UK. Sanna is currently working on her debut book on the science of modern dating and compatibility, releasing in 2025. She can be found @sanna_bp on Instagram.