Taliban's hypocrisy: Women can get botox but not rescued from earthquakes

UPDATED: Oct 3, 2025 23:19 IST

The Taliban wants women to cover up, but also wants them to look pretty for them. If this is not peak hypocrisy, then no one knows what is.

In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, women cannot go to gyms, parks, or universities, but they have been encouraged to get facelifts and botox. This makes for a rather paradoxical situation because women are not allowed to study at universities, so they cannot study to be doctors. Most doctors in Afghanistan are men. This, paired with the fact women also cannot show their faces to men who are not family, leads to a question: who is giving these women botox?

The Taliban has a solution to this problem. They are trying to attract foreign experts, mainly from Turkey, to come work in Afghanistan. Afghan doctors who trained abroad also return to fill the gap. That means facelifts, hair transplants, and lip fillers are fully operational, even under one of the strictest regimes on the planet.

While the Taliban has no problem finding loopholes in their own rules just to make sure that Afghan women look pretty only for their eyes, they also left women to die during a devastating earthquake that struck the country a few weeks ago. Under the Taliban's harsh laws, men cannot touch women who they are not married to, thus making rescue efforts for women increasingly difficult.

The catch here is, if they can find a loophole for cosmetic procedures, why could they not find a loophole for saving women's lives? It is a chilling reminder that under the Taliban, beauty gets priority over basic survival.

Afghan women are forced to navigate a world where their appearances must be approved. Daily life under these rules means women cannot work freely, cannot travel alone, cannot even exercise in public. Their education is halted, their voices silenced, yet somehow their faces and appearances remain a priority. Beauty becomes a permission slip granted by a regime that refuses to guarantee their safety, healthcare, or education. The irony is staggering: they can be beautified but not protected, pampered but not empowered, admired in mirrors but ignored in crises.

The ultimate paradox of modern Afghanistan: under strict religious laws, women can invest in Botox, facelifts, and Instagram-worthy looks, but they are denied the most basic freedoms and protections. Vanity flourishes while survival is optional.

Afghan women are left to navigate a world where their appearance is politicised, their bodies regulated, and their lives treated as secondary. And somehow, in this strange, grim reality, Botox is safer than an earthquake rescue.

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