Taliban's closure of secret beauty salons is a war on Afghan ..

The Taliban’s renewed assault on Afghanistan’s underground beauty salons strikes far deeper than the shuttering of businesses. These modest rooms, often tucked behind curtained windows and side doors, were sanctuaries where women could exhale, exchange confidences, and briefly reclaim their sense of self. For thousands, they offered not only livelihood but also dignity, a fragile space of colour and laughter in an increasingly airless world.

According to The Guardian, women have been given one month to close their clandestine salons or risk arrest. The order builds on the sweeping 2023 ban that forced more than twelve thousand salons to close, cutting off income for fifty thousand beauticians. Those who continued in secrecy did so with courage, knowing discovery could cost them everything. Community elders are now being pressed into service to expose these operations, handing them over to the so-called “vice and virtue” police.

For women like Frestha, a mother of three, the closure is not simply economic. “When a woman looked at herself in the mirror and smiled, her happiness became my happiness,” she said. That happiness has now been criminalised, leaving her and countless others unsure how to provide for their families or even how to imagine themselves in a society that insists on their erasure.

Since retaking power in 2021, the Taliban has steadily stripped Afghan women of education, employment, public presence, and even leisure. Beauty salons were among the last strongholds of community and autonomy. Their loss is both symbolic and practical: it removes income, companionship, and one of the last mirrors where women could see themselves clearly.

Yet memory resists suppression. The hum of hairdryers, the sparkle of conversation, the quiet courage shared between walls painted with hope—these endure. The Taliban may extinguish salons, but it cannot extinguish the truth that beauty and dignity are not bestowed by authority. They are carried within, and they remain unbroken.
**This news was published on Times of India on 2nd September, 2025.