I'm not a specialist of Qajar Iran but I got interested about it after browsing the Harvard University website Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran, which includes this delightful group portrait of Ismat al-Muluk, granddaughter of the King of Persia Nasir al-Din Shah, and her relatives, goofing around circa 1900. This led me to Harvard professor Afsaneh Najmabadi's book Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005) which sheds some light about the changes that took place in the facial features of Qajari women in the early 1900s.

First, it is true that facial hair, and particularly a thin mustache, used to be a sign of beauty for Qajari women. Najmabadi notes that, as a rule, "notions of beauty were largely undifferentiated by gender" and that "beautiful men and women were depicted with very similar facial and bodily features," such as wide-connected eyebrows. While full-grown men wore a full beard, the mustache was a beauty signifier for young men (amrad) in the homoerotic culture of premodern and early modern Persia:

An adolescent with the first trace of a mustache (nawkhatt) and before the full growth of facial hair (a process that could take a number of years) was considered the most beautiful. At the same time, that hint of a mustache (khatt) heralded the beginning of the end of his status as object of desire for adult men and his own movement into adult manhood.

This much-celebrated sign of a young man’s beauty was extended to women, who wore soft down, or painted a thin mustache on their upper lip with mascara, as an imitation of the khatt. Belgian traveller and explorer Carla Serana, invited to a feast given by the Princess ‘Ismat al- Dawlah in 1877, was surprised when the Princess expressed interest in making her up and used mascara to paint her a mustache and dark eyebrows.

However, by the end of the century, due in part to some heteronormalization brought by the (uneasy) contact with Europeans, the amrad had disappeared "from Iranian cultural imagination", making the khatt meaningless. Najmabadi notes that there was a parallel trend in the growing eroticization of the female breast in Qajar art, inspired by European representations. Educated Iranian men, in the early 1900s, "now fantasized and wrote endlessly" about European women and their "lighter features, thinner bodies, and hairless faces". Here are two women from King Nasir al-Din Shah's harem circa 1900: Baghiban Bashi on the left and the European "Chirkasi" ("the Circassian") on the right (the same women in Chinese and Japanese dresses respectively). Cultural pressure, disseminated by theatre plays and magazine articles among other channels, made sure that mascara-painted mustaches were now considered ugly, manly, and old-fashioned, and the tradition died by the 1920s. Najmabadi's book includes a before/after photo of a woman called Taj al-Saltanah, sporting a mustache and heavy eyebrows in the first picture, and looking as a standard Parisian woman in the next.

[It would be interesting to compare this to other traditions that went out of fashion in other countries during the same period, such a teeth blackening]

Source

• Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. University of California Press, 2005.