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| - Snopes corresponded by email with Sogol Hariri, who said she was the daughter of Sima — the woman in the picture. She said her mother recalled a photographer captured the image in Tehran in 1971. At the time, Sima was 18 and Iran Air had recently hired her as a flight attendant. Hariri also said Sima recalled the photo showed her cutting the cake not for herself but rather for a colleague's birthday party — a clarification leading us to append a mostly true rating on this specific claim made by an X user.
A rumor circulating online in early January 2025 claimed an historic photo showed a woman in Iran cutting her own birthday cake. The picture displayed the woman as wearing a short dress — a stark contrast to present-day dress-code rules enforced in the Middle Eastern country.
For example, on Jan. 1, an X user posted (archived) the picture with a caption we translated from the Turkish language to English, reading, "Images that marked a turning point in history. A woman cutting her birthday cake in Iran."
It's true the photo showed a woman in Iran cutting a birthday cake while wearing a short dress, with one slight clarification. The user claimed the image pictured the woman cutting her own cake. However, she was cutting a cake for a colleague. As such, we rated this claim as mostly true.
Snopes researched the photo's history and established contact with a person identifying herself as one of the children of the woman in the picture. That story appears below.
Women's Dress Code in Iran
In our search for more details about the photo of the woman, we noted a Facebook user reposted the same picture in 2022. The user's caption read, "Here is an image from Iran of a woman cutting her birthday cake in 1973, 5 years before the Islamic Revolution there. Just wanted to point out how things can change when the government gets religious."
Users commented under the photograph discussed how they believed the woman's smile and the freedom to wear the clothes she's dressed in portrayed a stark contrast to the country's present-day reality.
The U.S. Institute of Peace published information about how modern dress code rules and other discriminatory guidelines target women specifically in Iran, especially following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. For example, the Institute of Peace said that "all females [in Iran] are required to cover their hair and dress modestly from the age of puberty."
A Helpful Lead
The TinEye reverse image search website pointed to one of the earliest online postings of the woman's picture in a Reddit post from June 24, 2018. The post showed the caption, "Woman cutting her birthday cake in Tehran, Iran 1973."
After some more digging, we stumbled upon a helpful comment in a different Reddit thread from Dec. 22, 2020. In a repost on r/OldSchoolCool, Reddit user u/notbob1959 commented with information about a Pinterest board, writing, "The original source for this photo is a Pinterest board and it has a few other photos of this woman and her parents. The title of the board is 'My Mother in Iran - Inspirational pictures of my mother from the 60s' and it doesn't say the posted photo is of her birthday or outside of the 60s."
As the Reddit comment said, the Pinterest board was titled "My Mother in Iran." We contacted the Pinterest user to see if they could provide more details about the picture.
Her Name Is Sima
In 2022, the Pinterest user, Sogol Hariri, told Snopes she is the daughter of the woman in the picture. She revealed a photographer (not named by her) captured the photo in 1971, not 1973, and that it showed her mother, Sima, who was 18 years old at the time, just after Iran Air hired her as a flight attendant. She told us that Sima was cutting the cake in the picture for a colleague's birthday, not her own celebration.
By email, Hariri said her mother remembers the moment in the photograph "very vividly":
Let me start by clarifying that the photo was taken in 1971 in Tehran, Iran and she is in fact Iranian! My mother was born in 1953 in Tehran and this photo was taken when she was exactly 18 years old. Her name is Sima and she lived and worked in Tehran and ultimately got married and had all three of her children there. We all currently reside in Canada.
She remembers the context of the photo very vividly as she had recently been hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and has just started her training. One of her new colleagues at the airline invited her to a party celebrating his birthday and she took the honor of cutting his cake for all the guests. It was during her career at Iran Air that one of her colleagues encouraged her to model and she thus began a modeling career in Tehran, where she walked many fashion runways. I have attached a photo of her before one of her flights and a few of her modeling photos wearing different looks. She describes this period of her life as very exciting and glamourous! I have always loved looking at her photos from that time, which led me to casually post them on Pinterest. I had originally commented on Pinterest that her photos were taken in the 1960s but there is only one family photo that was taken then, and all the others were taken in the 1970s.
Hariri sent us several pictures of her mother and her modeling career. She also included a high-resolution version of the original photograph and another picture that showed Hariri holding the original print of her mother cutting the cake:
Sima working as a flight attendant for Iran Air.
Sima walking the runway during her modeling career.
Sima walking the runway during her modeling career.
Sima walking the runway during her modeling career.
Sima sitting in a room with international models.
The original photograph print of Sima cutting her colleague's cake in Tehran in 1971.
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