Taliban's closure of secret beauty salons is a war on Afghan women's identity!

The Taliban’s latest crackdown on Afghanistan’s underground beauty salons is more than the closure of a business, it is the silencing of one of the last spaces where women could breathe, earn, and feel seen. These salons were not just about hair or makeup. They were places where women laughed without fear, shared burdens they could not speak of at home, and left with their shoulders a little straighter after catching their reflection in a mirror.According to The Guardian, female salon owners across the country have been given just one month to shut down or face arrest. The order comes despite the Taliban’s 2023 ban, which already forced around 12,000 salons to close, leaving more than 50,000 beauticians unemployed. Many had been operating in secret, taking customers through side doors or curtained windows, clinging to their only means of survival and self-worth.Now, the Taliban has instructed community elders to identify these hidden salons and report their operators to the “vice and virtue” police. For 38-year-old Frestha, a mother of three and the sole provider for her family, her underground salon was more than an income, it was her pride. “When a woman looked at herself in the mirror and smiled, her happiness became my happiness,” she told The Guardian. Her words hold both love for her craft and grief for what is being stolen. “I don’t think I can keep going because the risk is too high,” she added, unsure how she will feed her children.Since regaining power in August 2021, the Taliban has relentlessly erased Afghan women from public life. Once able to hold parliamentary seats and run businesses, they are now banned from most jobs, secondary and higher education, politics, gyms, parks, and even speaking in public. Beauty salons - small, often windowless rooms buzzing with conversation and hope, had been one of the last places where women could exist without invisibility.The closures are a blow not only to economic survival, but to dignity itself. In the quiet hum of hairdryers and the intimacy of shared mirrors, Afghan women found a rare reprieve from the suffocating rules outside. The loss of these spaces is more than the loss of a livelihood, it is the loss of a lifeline.Even in the face of this darkness, the memory of those rooms, warm with laughter, bright with colour, alive with courage, remains. And in those memories lives an unshakable truth: beauty, dignity, and hope are not granted by any regime. They are carried within, and they endure.