Monday 07 / July / 2025
Muscat: Salons around the Sultanate can earn up to OMR1,000 a day as women flock to have henna applied in the days before Eid.
Women and girls in Oman queue for up to six hours to have henna applied in time for Eid and the salons are fully booked.
“The reason I only give out 100 tickets a day is that I do not want clients to overflow to the next day. Last Eid, women only left the salon a few hours before sunrise on the day of Eid,” said the owner of the a salon.
“I started queuing from 3:45am. My sisters and I were the first, in front of the salon queue. We waited for three hours, until the woman came out to give us tickets, but even after that, they only started working on us from 9am, because there were still women left over from the night before, who slept at the salon,” said a salon client.
“We take up to 60 clients in a day. We have been fully booked for the past week, and right until the day before Eid,” said another salon employee.
“Prices for hand henna is OMR10 for quarter, OMR12 for half and OMR14 for full. The price is double that for organic black henna,” said the employee.
“I booked almost a month earlier at this salon, because they are the only salon in Oman that uses organic black henna. I ended up paying OMR28 for my henna, but it was worth it,” said one client.
Women prefer to apply Henna two to three days before Eid so that when the First day of Eid arrives, the henna is still fresh.
“For Wednesday, we had 89 clients booked, and 60 for Thursday. Even though we are fully booked, we still take walk-in clients,” another salon boss told the Times of Oman.
“We have one full-time employee, who applies henna, but during Eid al Fitr, we bring in five more women from Africa, on a three-month visa, and keep them until Eid Al Adha,” said a salon owner in Qurum.
“I started working at 9am and it is now 9:30 at night, and I am still not done. It is hard to take a rest or eat in between clients, because there are just so many of them,” said an employee at the saloon.
Many women miss out as a result of the henna mayhem.
“I don’t like going to put henna during Eid because it gets so crowded and I feel like they don’t work efficiently, all they want to do is finish you and move on to the next customer.”
In an attempt to beat the queues, some mothers avoid going to salons with their young daughters and simply buy henna stickers.
“My daughter is only three, and I want her to have henna on her hands, because I feel that culturally it is so important, but I could never take her to the salons with me. I know that crowded places like that will just make her cranky, and so I just buy the stickers and put henna for her at home, it is so much easier,” said a mother.
