Marion Cotillard And Juliette Binoche Cut Their Hair On Instagram To Show Solidarity With Iranian Women

Allegedly, Mahsa Amini wasn't wearing her headscarf in the proper way, which prompted the "morality police" to arrest her and beat her. Sadly, she died a few days later on September 16 from a fatal blow to the head. Many women took to the streets to demonstrate and protest her senseless death, ripping off their hijab headscarves and burning them in bonfires.

Marion Cotillard and Juliette Binoche Cut Their Hair on Instagram to Show Solidarity With Iranian Women

The Iranian police reported that Amini died of a "heart attack." She was in a coma for three days and there are eyewitnesses that claim the police were physically beating Amini upon her arrest. An anonymous medical official said her death was caused by a head injury. Iranian women aren't the only ones who are showing solidarity for Amini.

On Wednesday, actress Marion Cotillard shared a video on Instagram in which she, actress Juliette Binoche, and various other women are seen cutting their hair. "For freedom," Binoche said right before she cut off a section of her hair. Cotillard is seen next cutting off a couple inches at the bottom of her hair. Many women of all ages followed with their own cutting of hair.

“For the courageous women and men of Iran who are changing the world at this very moment, fighting for freedom. We stand by you,” Cotillard wrote in the caption.

Protests took place in more than 40 Iranian cities and women from all over the world demonstrated their support in various ways, including by cutting their hair or shaving it off altogether. Iranians believe that hair is a sign of beauty and the Islamic Republic demands it be hidden; as a result, women are cutting off their hair as a sign of protest. Faezeh Afghan, an Iranian chemical engineer living in Italy, says it's a way to rebel against Islamic standards.

“We want to show them that we don’t care about their standards, their definition of beauty or what they think that we should look like,” she said. “It is to show that we are angry.”

“In our literature, cutting the hair is a symbol of mourning, and sometimes a symbol of protesting,” Afghan continued. “If we can cut our hair to show that we are angry… we will do it.” A 1,000-year-old Persian epic, Shahnameh, has 60,000 verses and it tells the stories of Persian kings; more than once, hair is pulled out of the head in an act of mourning.

This was one of the inspirations for Iranian women to cut their hair off, which then inspired actresses like Binoche and Cotillard to follow suit.