The Taliban have ordered the closure of clandestine beauty salons still operating in Afghanistan, warning that women running them have one month to cease work or face arrest. The directive intensifies the group’s already severe restrictions on women’s lives, stripping away one of the last remaining spaces where Afghan women could gather, earn livelihoods and maintain a sense of dignity.
Officially, all beauty salons were closed in August 2023, a move that shuttered an estimated 12,000 businesses and wiped out more than 50,000 jobs held almost exclusively by women. The ban not only eliminated a vital source of income but also removed one of the rare venues where women could meet outside the confines of the home. Yet many salons continued in secret, often hidden in back rooms of houses or unmarked shops.
Now the Taliban are seeking to stamp them out altogether. Local elders and community leaders have been ordered to report underground salons to the “vice and virtue” police, the force responsible for enforcing the group’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.
For women like Frestha, a 38-year-old mother of three, the risk of arrest has made her future uncertain. She began operating her salon covertly in 2023 after the official ban. “I was the only breadwinner in my family; my husband was sick, and I had three children to care for,” she said. “But I also kept going because when a woman looked at herself in the mirror and smiled, her happiness became my happiness.”
She now fears she can no longer continue. “The risk is too high,” she said. “But I know no other work. Our situation is very bad, but in this world there is no one to hear our voice or support us.”
Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, they have imposed what human rights groups describe as a system of gender apartheid. Women have been barred from most forms of paid employment, girls excluded from secondary schools and universities, and access to public life steadily erased. Women cannot enter parks, gyms or public baths, are required to travel with a male guardian, and must cover themselves fully when outside. Even their voices are increasingly silenced: women are prohibited from speaking in public spaces where men are present.
The new order threatens to extinguish even that. Rights advocates warn that the Taliban’s crackdown on underground salons is part of a deliberate strategy to erase women from both the economy and public life. “What we are witnessing is the systematic destruction of women’s agency,” said one Kabul-based activist, who asked not to be named for security reasons. “The salons may seem small, but for many women they represented independence, resilience and connection. Their closure deepens the isolation.”
