Twenty-five-year-old Zahra is convinced she is not pretty.
First, it’s her eyes.
“I want to get rid of this extra skin,” she says, pinching the skin above her eyes. “It pains me to even look at it,” she adds, pulling at it with her fingers.
Then, there’s that nose. That “small, flat, unattractive nose,” as Zahra describes it. She wants a bigger one.
She has made up her mind. In a couple of hours, doctors will numb her eyelids and cut off that extra skin. She’ll be one step closer to looking the way she has always wanted — with open eyes and a big nose.
Zahra and other patients in this story asked that PRI withhold their full names because of the sensitivities surrounding their situations.
Dr. Zalmai Khan Ahmadzai, a dermatologist and aesthetics specialist in Kabul, Afghanistan, is the surgeon who is going to operate on Zahra. He is tall and strides around his busy clinic with swagger.
The waiting area of his clinic is abuzz. There are men, women and kids, each with a problem they hope to have fixed.
Dr. Ahmadzai proudly shows off the two dozen awards and certificates hanging on the wall of his office, listing off all the places where he got them from. “Germany, Dubai, India … ” The list goes on.
Behind him, there’s a framed picture on his desk. He’s standing next to Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s president. The two are shaking hands.
Ahmadzai says 10 years ago, when he first opened his clinic in Kabul, people were skeptical about cosmetic surgery.
“They thought that, for example, laser can produce cancer,” he says.
But he saw a market.
Ahmadzai went on television. In ads and on national programs, he told Afghans — mostly Afghan women — that a wrinkle-free forehead doesn’t have to be a thing of dreams. That cosmetic surgery has made it to Afghanistan.
“So, now people have a [a lot more] awareness about aesthetic specialty, plastic surgery and also dermatology.”
In some ways, Ahmadzai’s timing couldn’t have been better.
A lot of women visiting Ahmadzai’s clinic came of age under the Taliban, when television, movies and music were banned.
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