O day the Taliban took control of Afghanistan's capital Kabul, advertising posters outside beauty parlours showing women in bridalwear were painted over. Salons around the city were closed down too. While some businesses have vowed to return to full service soon, others fear for their futures. Afsoon (not her real name), a make-up artist in hiding, describes how much the beauty industry has meant to Afghan women
t's hard to translate the exact meaning of the Dari phrase takaan khordum into other languages.
Roughly, it describes a rare life event that shakes you to your core, after which you will have changed forever - like the death of someone you love, someone central to your life.
Afsoon experienced the feeling of takaan for the first time on 15 August 2021.
That Sunday she woke at 10:00 to a call from a colleague at the beauty salon where she worked. Afsoon was at her happiest there, the smell of fresh shampoo and nail polish mixed with the whir of a hairdryer and chatter.
"Don't come in today," Afsoon's co-worker told her when she rang. "We are closing up. It's over."
Sitting up in bed, Afsoon checked her mobile. Her thumb moved up and down the screen of her phone as she scrolled through dozens of texts from friends and family and then hundreds of social media posts. A torrent of dread slammed her with such force that she felt freezing cold and sick at the same time.
The messages were all the same. The Taliban had entered Afghanistan's capital Kabul. Within 16 days Western troops and their diplomats were gone from the country.
"It's over," she repeated to herself. It was time to hide.
Afsoon is in her mid-20s and considers herself a modern Afghan woman.
She loves social media, she loves movies, she can drive and she has career ambitions.
Afsoon can't remember the time in the 90s, the decade she was born, when the Taliban first banned beauty salons in her country.
But she grew up in an Afghanistan where beauty parlours were a regular part of her life. In the two decades since the US-led invasion that ousted the Taliban in 2001, more than 200 beauty parlours opened in Kabul alone, with hundreds more in other parts of the country.
As a teenager she would thumb through magazines and social media for glamorous looks, and she'd visit salons with women in her family.
She loved everything about that world. The multi-coloured nail painting, the make-up artists bent over women to paint smoky kohl eyeliners to frame thick brushed eyelashes on a dewy sparkling made-up face. The glossy blow-dries and swishy long hairstyles.