Kabul Beauty School

Published in 2007, Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil is a memoir by Deborah Rodriguez. The story follows Rodriguez, an American, through her time in Afghanistan from 2002-2006 as she opens a beauty school. A hairdresser and motivational speaker, Rodriguez has authored two fiction novels and an additional memoir titled Margarita Wednesdays: Making a New Life by the Mexican Sea. She currently owns a salon and spa in Mexico, where she resides. Kabul Beauty School was scheduled for a movie adaptation, but the project has since fallen through.

When the Taliban was driven out of Afghanistan in 2001, it opened the war-torn country to outside humanitarian aid that was otherwise impossible under the regime's strict laws. In 2002, Deborah Rodriguez arrives in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. A recently-divorced Michigan native and a beautician by training, she is serving as a medical assistant with a relief organization. Quickly, however, she notices stark differences in the lives of Afghani women from what she is used to seeing in the West.

In Kabul, the women rarely venture out of their homes. When they do, they are covered and veiled. They walk with their heads and eyes held low, passive and submissive to the men around them. Worst still, they are treated as little more than property, forced to stay in abusive situations because they lack any means of financial independence. Deborah often refers to the country as "Manistan" for its misogynistic attitudes.



In Afghanistan, beauty salons are one of the few businesses afforded to women. The Taliban closed the salons down, claiming they made women into prostitutes. But now that the Taliban is gone, Deborah sees an opportunity to help the women of Kabul in the best way she knows how: she opens a beauty salon.

Soon customers flock to her store. Among them are Westerners eager for a haircut like what they would receive at home, but most are Afghani women. As she hears their stories of oppression, she decides to turn the salon into a beauty school so that her students will be able to open their own salons and achieve financial independence for themselves and their children. She founds the Kabul Beauty School, saying, "I knew from my own experience as a hairdresser back home that a salon is a good business for a woman— especially if she has a bad husband."

The stories of Deborah's students are often heartbreaking. There is the girl sold into marriage at the age of twelve in order to pay off her family's debts. There is the woman whose husband beats her every day to stop her from coming to the school. The women suffer confinement, rape, and many other types of abuses. Yet in the school, they can safely express themselves: joking, dancing, and comforting each other with laughter and tears.



Three weeks after her arrival in Kabul, Deborah marries Sam, an Afghan man. He already has a wife and seven children in Saudi Arabia, but his family has given him permission to take another wife. Deborah meets Sam through some mutual friends and marries him even after he is honest about his other family. However, when his first wife later finds out that she is expecting her eighth child, Deborah is extremely upset by the news.

Even though she runs the Kabul Beauty School, Deborah still has a lot to learn about Afghani beauty standards. She discovers Afghani women believe that American women wear so little makeup that they look like men. Instead they prefer liberal uses of a variety of colors, jeweled accents, and thick kohl eyeliner--far beyond what any Western beauty school would advise. Deborah also learns that there are no hair dryers in Afghanistan when she uses one on a client, and the client screams and leaps from her chair.

One particular beauty concept that the students struggle to understand is the color wheel used in hair dyeing to correct the contributing pigment that underlies a person’s primary hair color. But once she explains that the primary hair pigment is like Satan, and it must be fought with the force of opposite color, the students finally grasp the concept. Soon they are dyeing like professionals.



Not unexpectedly, the school faces many bureaucratic hurdles, but Deborah refuses to conform herself to the behavior expected of Afghani women. She smokes, drinks, and goes outside without her hair covered. Once, she punches a man in the face in response to being groped. Using her assertive nature, Deborah fights to keep her school open.

Many of her graduates use their new skills to change their lives. Deborah tells the story of Nahida, who lives with an abusive husband. After Nahida opens her own salon, she begins saving small amounts of money. When she is able to convince her husband to divorce her, she has enough money to not only survive, but to expand her business. Deborah writes that on average, her graduates are able to increase the income of their families by 400%.