Inside a clandestine aesthetics center in Afghanistan

Special correspondent in Kabul“Which floor are you going to?” a girl asks a woman who is walking with a child by the hand, carrying a large travel bag, and waiting for the elevator in the building's entrance. “To the sixth,” the woman replies. Coincidentally, both are going to the same floor, and both are dressed in a strictly Islamic manner: black tunic and headscarf, and a mask covering part of their faces. Inside the elevator, they don't exchange many words either: like everyone else, they comment that it's too hot in Kabul these days. When they reach the sixth floor, they realize they are not only going to the same floor but also to the same place.

From the outside, it looks like a normal, ordinary apartment. Inside, the layout is also that of a conventional apartment – three rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen – but in two of the rooms, there are large mirrors on the walls and hairdressing chairs. Since August 2023, when the Taliban ordered the closure of all hairdressing and beauty salons for women in Afghanistan, many of these establishments have moved to private homes. The clients continue to go there, but clandestinely.

In July, the Taliban further tightened their long list of restrictions and prohibited women from applying makeup, using perfume, or getting hair extensions when attending a wedding, which is very common in Afghanistan. It is at weddings that women try to show their best selves, in a country where they have few opportunities to go out and there are almost no places where they can have fun. They are not even allowed to walk in parks.

Despite the prohibition, in the apartment on the sixth floor, there is a dozen women queuing to apply makeup, perfume, and style their hair. And some also want to have extensions put in. They are all going to a wedding that day. They are family of the groom or the bride, who is also waiting patiently to be pampered. None of them seem concerned about the new Taliban rule.

In fact, there is quite a commotion in the apartment. The women are talking animatedly and the young children of some are running around. On the balcony, a generator makes a deafening noise, but it's the only way to have electricity to run the dryer. There are also large windows through which natural light enters, and from which you can see the mountains surrounding Kabul. In other words, it's not a gloomy, closed, and claustrophobic apartment, as one might imagine it to be a clandestine place. The women seem to be completely relaxed: they have removed their veils and tunics, and are showing off long hair and Western clothing. Some are even dressed in tight leggings that accentuate all their body shapes.

"The building's doorman will warn us if the Taliban come. That's why I chose a sixth-floor apartment, to have time to hide everything before they arrive," explains the beautician, Yalda, while she applies makeup to one of the clients. According to her, she used to have a nice beauty salon with a dozen employees in the Kabul neighborhood of Khair Khana, until the Taliban forced her to close it, although she tried by all means to keep it open: she participated in negotiation meetings held at the time with the radicals, and in which the gender advisor of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, the South African Mmabatlharo Nono Dihemo, was even involved. During those days, doing makeup and hair almost became a matter of state. And rightly so. Beauty salons were the last refuge where Afghan women could continue to meet and feel a little free.

"The Taliban imposed surreal conditions on us for beauty salons to remain open. They wanted clients to pray five times before we fixed them, for us to apply makeup that they could wash off before prayer, and for us not to shape their eyebrows or put extensions on their eyelashes," explains Yalda. In the end, they ended up decreeing the closure of all centers.

Yalda explains that the Taliban have only burst into her clandestine beauty salon once. And it was, she says, because someone betrayed her after one of her clients left the building and got into a wedding car parked right in front. "When the Taliban came, I started crying and said that the girl I had made up was my cousin," she recalls. They believed her.

On this occasion, the clients waiting to be made up and have their hair done have brought the dresses they will wear to the wedding in trash bags. They will put them on right there, in the beauty salon, but they will cover themselves with tunics to leave. They will also cover their faces with a black scarf. In Afghanistan, it is tradition for women to wear excessive makeup at weddings, to the point that they look almost like wax figures. It is difficult for them to go unnoticed.

In another room, the woman waiting for the elevator with a child by the hand is attending to other clients. She is also a beautician and, in the travel bag she was carrying, keeps all the material she needs to work: she does tattoos and injects botox into lips. The clients are a mother, a daughter, and a sister-in-law. All three want her to tattoo a beauty mark on the exact same spot on their face: under the lip. The daughter, who is a 22-year-old girl seven months pregnant and already has a child just over a year old, also asks her to inject botox. And if she could ask her for something else, she would. Anything, before being locked up at home again.