New York ? Under Taliban rule, beauty salons in Afghanistan were banned. Since the regime also decreed that women be covered from head to toe in heavy burqas, banned from workplaces and schools and virtually restricted to their homes, the salon ban might seem irrelevant.

But it wasn’t. Secret salons flourished, despite the risk of severe punishment and an extreme shortage of materials. A new beauty school in Kabul aims to rectify that situation, offering training with top-of-the-line materials and a way for women to make a living out in the open.

The Kabul Beauty School, which graduated its first class in October, has also become a source of support for the women as they adjust to newfound freedoms.

“The most affecting thing about the beauty school is just to have that contact,” says Julia Reed, a Vogue senior writer who wrote about her August visit to the Kabul Beauty School for the magazine’s November issue.

The image of vain women chatting away at a beauty salon has become a negative stereotype in American culture, but the sense of community shared by the Afghan women in the course of practicing hair and makeup techniques was far from shallow chitchat.

“They haven’t been able to share their stories or ask advice for a problem or say, ‘What do you do when your child is teething?’ — just normal things that women have been doing since medieval times. For all purposes, they have been under house arrest,” Reed says.

In the secret salons, hairdressers used perm rollers that were crudely carved out of wood with thick rubber band fasteners. Makeup was so valuable that women would bury it, Reed says.

“I thought to myself, ‘Would I really risk my life for having some well-groomed hair and makeup?”‘ Reed says. “I think that they were so dehumanized, it was the one way they could keep self-respect, even though nobody could see them.”

Because many women were already running secret salons, it was a natural choice for many seeking jobs after the Taliban’s ouster. Interest in the Kabul Beauty School was so keen that a lottery was held to fill the first 20 slots. More than 200 women are on the waiting list for the next class.

The idea for the school was born in late 2001, when hairstylist Terri Grauel was working on a photo shoot for a Vogue story on Mary MacMakin, an aid worker who had been expelled from Kabul. MacMakin and Grauel hit it off, came up with the beauty school idea and enlisted Patricia O’Connor, a marketing and development consultant to the beauty industry.

The trio approached Vogue with the idea, and the magazine cut a check for $25,000 to build the school and held a fund-raising lunch to solicit help from other beauty industry leaders. developed the core curriculum for makeup, contributed money and cosmetics, and shot a cosmetics training video in Dari, the most common language spoken in Afghanistan. Clairol contributed $60,000 and created the school’s hair coloring curriculum.