Taliban Crack Down on Afghanistan’s Underground Beauty Salons

Taliban Crack Down on Afghanistan’s Underground Beauty Salons
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The Taliban have ordered a nationwide crackdown on clandestine beauty salons in Afghanistan, giving women running them one month to close or face arrest, The Guardian reported.

Although the group banned all salons in August 2023, shutting down 12,000 businesses and eliminating more than 50,000 female jobs, many women continued to operate secretly, seeing the salons as both a livelihood and a rare space of self-expression.

Community leaders and elders have now been instructed to identify and report such businesses to the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” police.

For many women, the closures are devastating. “When the Taliban closed our salons, I was the only breadwinner,” said Frestha, a 38-year-old mother of three, who has been working in secret since 2023. “Now, I don’t think I can keep going because the risk is too high … our situation is very bad, but in this world there is no one to hear our voice or support us.”

Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban have barred women from most jobs, banned girls from secondary and higher education, and closed public spaces for women, imposing what human rights groups call a system of gender apartheid.