"THREADING? Yes, yes, I can show you," she says excitedly and promptly excuses herself from the table as our annual Lunar New Year dinner at my late grandmother's house nears its end.

Madam Heng Puay Hwee, my late grandmother's niece and my paternal cousin once-removed, makes a beeline for my grandmother's old Singer sewing machine, a relic that has been around for longer than I have been alive. She finds a spool of white thread and snips off a metre-long strand.

"My teeth aren't strong enough anymore to bite the thread, so I need to find another way," she says. Her teeth may not be what they were before, but at 72, she is spirited, robust and sturdy. She buzzes through the house, determined to find a fixture to secure the thread.

She speaks to me in a rapid-fire mishmash of Teochew and Mandarin. The former is the dialect of her birthplace, Jieyang, a village in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong; the latter is the language she learnt after coming to Singapore at just 12 years old in 1959 – which, she reminds me more than once, is the year the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew was first elected Prime Minister.

Eventually, she finds what seems like the perfect spot and quickly loops the thread over a hook next to a small mirror. "Come here and try," she says, gesturing to our curious onlooking relatives. They exchange glances before one of her cousins volunteers.

As she twists the thread around her fingers, she begins telling tales of times past. "Back in China, I learnt how to thread by watching my mother and her friends at home, who would thread each other's faces," she says. "I did it for myself occasionally, whenever I felt like I needed to brighten up my face."

"I never touched my eyebrows though. You must really know how to shape them, if not things can go very wrong. Half of your eyebrow could disappear," she says with a laugh. "I'm just an amateur at this. I keep to the face only because it's easier."

After settling down in Singapore, she and other Chinese immigrants continued to thread their faces for each other at home, she says. They even gathered to do it along the streets of Chinatown and areas such as Blanco Court, which is where Raffles Hospital stands today. "But I stopped doing it when I got older because there was no hair left on my face to remove," she adds. "I threaded my daughter's face before her wedding though. It was a tradition we followed back in China."

China is where threading originates, say other threaders who learnt the skill in beauty institutes in India. The technique then spread to India, where some people today think it comes from. Yet, a further dig into the origins of threading reveals an ambiguous history.

According to some online sources, ancient records first document the technique in China around 300 years ago, where it was called wan lian. Other sources, however, say threading started in India more than 6,000 years ago.

A teacher in her 40s, Ms Lalita Singh, also said that according to her mother, who immigrated here from India as a young bride over 50 years ago, Indian women then threaded each other's faces and eyebrows at home too.

And in How to Create the Perfect Eyebrow, a book by licensed esthetician and make-up artist Victoria Bush, threading, or khite in Arabic, is thought to have originated in Arabia.

From the scant information gathered on threading's origin, even after combing through online research databases, as well as books on epilation and beauty at the library, it may be that the history of this hair removal method has not been closely studied.

But, as a type of epilation, it probably has multiple origins – instead of a single cultural origin – with different versions of the practice emerging at similar moments in time in different cultures, said Nanyang Technological University's Assistant Professor of History Ngoei Wen-Qing.

Wherever threading came from, it is certain that it eventually arrived on the shores of Singapore, brought along by immigrants like Mdm Heng.

Some also passed on the skill to their children, who were born later in Singapore. My aunt Lau Siew Kheng, who was born after my grandmother got married here, said she learnt to thread at 18 years old, when she started paying more attention to her appearance.

Many of their neighbours, who were Chinese, also threaded their faces at home. "I've always thought of it as something that people do at home, so I was quite surprised when I found out there were beauty parlours in Little India doing eyebrow threading," the 75-year-old added.

This was pioneered by Menaka Bridal and Beauty, an eyebrow threading parlour opened in the 1980s, according to threaders in Little India. Although its owner, Ms Menaka Tharmarajoo, declined to comment, a visit to the salon on the second floor on Selegie Centre shows that they now have another outlet at Jurong Point Shopping Centre. Ms Menaka still runs the business today.

Back then, though, she taught the skill to younger threaders starting out in the industry.

Home-based beautician Jessyca Frans was one of her students around 20 years ago. The 47-year-old noted that it was only in the 1990s that more and more threading shops popped up in Little India.

On NewspaperSG, the National Library's online archive of old newspapers, the oldest advertisements for threading services date back to the late 1970s. Most of them were posted by freelance beauticians and salons in Peninsula Plaza, for example.

Yet, as threading grew in popularity, whether or not it was a beauty practice that belonged to a unique culture did not seem to matter. People of all races, cultures and ages – my friends and I included – flocked to parlours to get their eyebrows threaded.

Ms Lalita, who has been regularly threading her eyebrows for more than two decades, noticed this same trend. In the past, she would only see other Indians in the parlours.

"But now, when I visit my parlour in Hougang, there's always a long queue and so many Chinese and Malays in it. People from all races are doing threading now," she said.

"Threading is kind of like chicken rice – cheap, good and available everywhere. Although it's basically Chinese food, all Singaporeans eat and love it," she said.

"In Singapore, we are exposed to each other's lifestyles and culture. When we see something good, we try it, adapt it and use it. For me, that's just our Singaporean culture."