A woman sits with foils coated in dye folded around her long, black hair while another talks with the hairstylist is a typical scene in any hair salon.

Yet, Nefertiti Beauty  isn’t an ordinary salon. It’s a women-only space catering to customers from Arab and Muslim communities in East Bay, California, many of whom wear the hijab.

It’s “a place where you can come and get your hair taken care of by people who look like you and know your hairstyle because Middle Eastern hair has a unique texture to it,” Mufadhella Al Badeh, the owner of the salon, told Berkeley Side.

Badeh, who wears the hijab herself, arrived in the East Bay from Yemen more than 16 years ago. She opened the salon in 2018 and now runs it with help from her 20-year-old daughter Katebah.

Badeh started the salon when she recognized there was a need for beauty services friendly to immigrant women.

The hair salon has “really taught all of us random skills, like how to make business cards, how to make a website, and how to make everything from scratch,” Katebah said.

While other Middle Eastern immigrants, like those from Palestine or Lebanon, came to the Bay Area to go to school, many Yemenis came on lottery visas.

“With a lot of other groups, they came with educational visas. Meanwhile, a lot of Yemenis came with lottery visas or papers or just some way, so they start off in blue-collar jobs,” Katebah explained. “It’s very much, ‘just make it here.’ ”

Nefertiti Beauty is the first beauty salon of its kind on the West Coast, yet Badeh hopes to expand her services to other cities.

“My goal is to eventually have it in every town,” Badeh said.

Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations.

Though this initiative of ‘Muslim women salon’ seems to be unique in California, it is not the first in the US.

In 2017, a Muslim women-only beauty salon opened in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, offering hijabi women a place where they can safely let their hair down without fear of any privacy intrusion.

Another salon for Muslim women opened last February in Massachusetts, becoming the state’s first salon and spa established specifically for Muslim women.