Afghanistan’s Taliban have outlawed women’s beauty parlors.

Afghanistan’s women’s beauty shops are forbidden by the Taliban, a government spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Following decrees banning them from work, public places, and most types of education, it is the most recent restriction on the rights and freedoms of Afghan women and girls.

Mohammad Sidik Akif Mahajar, the Virtue and Vice Ministry’s spokesperson, declined to provide specifics about the restriction. He just validated what was said in a letter that was going around on social media.
According to the letter from the ministry, dated June 24, it contains a verbal directive from the supreme commander, Hibatullah Akhundzada. The prohibition affects all of the country’s provinces as well as the capital, Kabul, and gives salons a month to close their doors. They must shut after that time and give a report on their closure. There are no justifications for the prohibition in the letter.

Its publication follows Akhundzada’s assertion that his administration has taken the required actions to improve the lives of Afghan women.

On social media, it received condemnation from proponents of women’s and human rights.

On Tuesday, the UN also said that it was in contact with Afghan officials to get the ban on beauty parlors lifted. UNAMA, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, tweeted to the Taliban to tell them to stop issuing the decree.

It noted that the “new restriction on women’s rights will have a negative economic impact and contradicts declared support for women’s entrepreneurship.”

One owner of a beauty parlor had said that when her husband died away in a 2017 vehicle bombing, she was the family’s only provider. For fear of retaliation, she didn’t want her name or her salon mentioned.

Every day, she added, between eight and twelve ladies visit her salon in Kabul.

“They (the Taliban) are restricting women day by day,” she told The Associated Press. “Why do they just want to attract women? Are we not human? Do we not have the right to live and work?

The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021 as U.S. and NATO soldiers were withdrawing, despite early assurances that their reign would be more moderate than during their last tenure in power in the 1990s. Since then, they have enacted severe policies.

They have restricted media freedoms and banned women from public places like parks and gyms. The actions have aggravated a humanitarian catastrophe and sparked a heated international backlash, further isolating the nation at a time when its economy is collapsing.