Beauty in secrecy
Benafsha picks up a makeup brush and applies green eye shadow to the face of a young woman who will be married in a few hours. She works under the light streaming in from a small window in the back of her room.
Benafsha is 35 years old and has 15 years of experience as a beautician. In the small room behind her living room, she secretly does makeup for women. To keep her salon hidden from the Taliban, Benafsha takes special precautions. “To keep my work hidden, I invite my clients through social media and phone. They must contact me before coming and get the location, sometimes I take them to a friend’s house and work on them there,” she tells Zan Times. In her hidden beauty room, she keeps her makeup tools. Many of her clients come secretly to her home, get made up, and then leave, covered by their burqas.
As the sole breadwinner for her family of four, she has no choice but to work as a beautician. Her husband has been unable to find work after being fired from his government job when the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan. “For all these years, I have worked hard to earn a living, but now the Taliban has created many obstacles for us,” she explains.
She learned the art of makeup in Pakistan, where she lived for five years after finishing school: “Since childhood, I have been interested in fashion and makeup, but my family encouraged me to become a doctor or engineer.”
Benafsha lives in a three-room house in Kandahar and pays a monthly rent of 8,000 afghani. She has an assistant in her small beauty salon, a 22-year-old named Nargis. Like Benafsha, Nargis turned to beautician work after graduating from school and has managed to learn a lot in a short time. “Benafsha is like a mother to me,” she says. “She taught me how to do makeup and how to interact with clients.”
Nargis has been working at Benafsha’s salon for eleven months. She says, “Every day, from eight in the morning until eight at night, and sometimes until ten at night, we would work. But after the salons were shut down, we had to continue working secretly.”
On July 24, 2023, the Taliban ordered that women’s beauty salons would be banned as of August 24, 2023. Furthermore, the licenses and contracts of these salons would be revoked. That order effectively closed the businesses of more than 60,000 female beauticians, though some turned to underground salons or working from home.
A source in the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce, where salons were registered, tells Zan Times 12,000 beauty salons closed across the country due to the new Taliban decree. According to officials from the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce, 3,200 of those salons operated in Kabul, while the rest were in other provinces. The impact has been widespread, with the source explaining, “If we consider an average of five people benefiting from the income of each beauty salon employee nationwide, with the closure of the salons, around 300,000 people will be deprived of their work and income.”
Nargis knows the dangers involved in her job but her income helps her elderly father, a farmer, pay for expenses for their six-member family. She fears that the Taliban might storm Benafsha’s home and arrest her, her teacher, and their clients. Nargis is careful: “When clients come to the house, I quietly gesture to them where to go. Once they are ready, I don’t let them leave the house in fancy or bridal dresses.”
Women in Afghanistan continue to work in beauty salons despite Taliban prohibitions and threats. In addition to making needed income for their families, they bravely resist the limitations imposed by the Taliban and seek a better and freer life.
The bride getting her makeup done at Benafsha’s house is named Fatima. She and her older sister want a proper beauty treatment. “I was very worried about how I could hold my wedding without makeup and beauty,” says Fatima. “I wanted to look beautiful, so I found Benafsha’s address and came to her house quietly so no one would find out.”
Even though the Taliban have announced several times that women should not go to home beauty salons in their area, Fatima accepts this risk to have her desired wedding celebration. She adds that Afghan women are very talented and continue their struggle against the Taliban with elegance and beauty: “I commend them, and I hope they remain strong like this until the end and continue their work.”
Fatima hopes that the Taliban will leave Afghanistan, which would allow women to return to their formerly normal life: “I think maybe one day we will be free again and live comfortably like before.”
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer. Nilgoon Farzan is the pseudonym of a female journalist in Afghanistan.
