Growth begins in the dermis, the thickest layer of skin sandwiched between the epidermis and hypodermis, in young men between the ages of twelve and sixteen. As testosterone levels rise, some of it converts into dihydrotestosterone, which stimulates hair follicles to produce thicker, rougher facial hair, usually first appearing on the upper lip. This hair grows at a rate of roughly half a millimeter per day. On average, it takes around 600 individual whiskers to cover the upper lip and form a mustache.
Archaeologists believe, based on Auguste Mariette’s findings from an 1871 dig in Meidum, that mustaches date as far back as 2600 BC. In a mudbrick and limestone tomb just north of the pyramid of Snefru, Mariette unearthed a statue of Rahotep, an Egyptian prince from the Fourth Dynasty. Rahotep, as depicted in the statue, has a thick layer of black running across his upper lip, detailed and manicured like a mustache.
“The mustache may be a perfect, postmodern symbol of masculinity: playful, ironic, virile, independent, and, above all, sociable. Men of the mustache make up a new fraternity, one of the few, non-militaristic options for male bonding across age, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.” —Allan Peterkin, One Thousand Mustaches: A Cultural History of the Mo, 2012.
I get a lot of comments on my mustache. Most of them come when I’m in a bar, and almost all of them are from men who also have mustaches. Recently, I was in a hotel bar when a mustached man approached me. He had been at the other end of the bar with whom I assumed was his girlfriend before he grabbed his Old Fashioned and sauntered over to me.
“What do you think I do for work?” he said as he approached me. He looked to be in his late twenties, and, save for the mustache, he was as nondescript and homogenous as late-twenties white guys get.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“For work,” he said. “What do you think I do?”
I paused for a beat and looked him up and down. “Uh, maybe tech sales or something in finance. I don’t know.”
He took the empty barstool next to me and said, “Everybody always thinks I’m, like, a cop or something because of the ‘stache.” He ran his thumb and forefinger through his mustache. “But I knew you’d get it.” He then went on to tell me what he really did for work, but most of all he wanted to talk about his mustache.
“She’s not a fan of it,” he said, pointing toward the woman he was with at the other end of the bar, who was now watching us. “My family doesn’t like it either,” he went on. “They say it looks like a porn ‘stache.”
“The man who decides to sport lip adornment asserts his masculinity and desire to tyrannize over the home. No matter how prettily he waxes it, droops it, shingles it, at heart he’s the Man’s Man and ruler of his own roost.” —Cornelia B. Von Hessert, New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 24, 1944.
Around the mid-1800s, the British military required all officers and soldiers to wear mustaches. The rule was so strictly enforced that troops who couldn’t grow a mustache resorted to painting one on with dark wax. The belief behind the decree was that the compulsory mustached look showed uniformity among the troops and gave each soldier an aura of strength and virility that a clean-shaven face could not.
“In wrestling, my mustache made me look more like a villain. A good mustache can give you the look of the devil.” —Jesse Ventura, Former Governor of Minnesota and Professional Wrestler.
In 2016, John Bolton, former Ambassador to the United Nations, was rumored to be a possible choice for Secretary of State in president-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. Trump, however, nominated ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson to the position in lieu of Bolton. Many of Trump’s close associates claimed it was Bolton’s prominent, thick, brush-like mustache that ultimately helped Trump in finalizing his decision for Secretary of State. An anonymous source close to the president-elect at the time said: “Donald was not going to like that mustache.”
The Prophet Muhammad tells his followers in the Hadith: “Do the opposite of what the pagans do. Keep the beards and cut the mustaches short.”
The mustache was in danger of extinction in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Behind this threat were the Three Horsemen of the Mustache Apocalypse: 1. Emperor Hirohito, who donned a thin swath of fuzz layered across his upper lip. 2. Joseph Stalin, famous for his robust, imposing patch of hair finely groomed at the ends. And 3. Adolf Hitler, universally identified by his jet-black toothbrush-style mustache. The mustache, then, became synonymous with the enemy in the United States.
For over twenty years the mustache lay dormant in America. In the late 1960s, however, Hollywood kickstarted the mustache revival, most notably in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Robert Redford, playing Harry Longabaugh AKA the Sundance Kid, sports a mustache. By the 1980s, Hollywood had succeeded in its revival. Every Thursday night, from 1981 to 1988, millions of Americans tuned in to CBS to watch mustached private investigator Thomas Magnum (played by Tom Selleck) solve lurid cases involving missing persons, stolen valuables, and the occasional murder. Magnum represented the ideal American man—brave, tough, intelligent, rational—and his famous Chevron mustache became an inseparable part of his identity.
I first tried growing a mustache when I was twenty. I did it out of curiosity; partly to see what I would look like, and partly to see the reactions I’d get. I let my facial hair grow for a week before I shaved it down to the mustache. It wasn’t much of a mustache, just a subtle patch of stubbly black hairs above my lip. This was a couple years before the mustache renaissance of COVID and quarantine, so my freshly sprouted whiskers weren’t well received. The first day I went to work with the mustache, my coworkers were quick to inform me that it made me look like a creep, or, even worse, a pedophile. My family echoed these comments. Strangers, too, I noticed, looked at me differently. I remember one gas station clerk, an older woman probably in her sixties, told me she hadn’t seen someone as young as me with a mustache since she herself was my age. Nevertheless I kept the mustache for about six weeks, and although my mustache grew fuller, the comments and strange looks didn’t let up. My sister’s wedding was what finally made me shave it. To me, it simply seemed more pragmatic to return to my old look than to deal with the responses from family and friends who hadn’t yet seen the mustache. By that point, I was fed up with all the comments and attention it elicited. It would be another few years before I let the hair above my lip grow for longer than a day or two.
In 1916, the British military overturned its mustache requirement. The novel tactic of chemical warfare required all ground troops to wear gas masks to prevent the inhalation of deadly chemicals, and mustaches made it difficult for troops to properly wear the masks. It was an easy decision, one made by General Nevil Macready. Shortly after he abolished the rule, Macready said: “On 8th October, 1916, the order allowing all ranks to grow or not to grow mustaches according to their fancy was signed… I dropped into a barber’s shop and set the example that evening, as I was only too glad to be rid of the unsightly bristles to which I had for many years been condemned by obedience to regulations.”
“My mustache gets so many questions he has his own agent now.” —Tom Selleck, Emmy-nominated Actor and 1980s Heartthrob.
According to historian Christopher Oldstone-Moore, in accordance with twentieth-century American social mores, a man with a clean-shaven face signified a virtuous man, a man committed to his community and the betterment of the collective. The mustached man, in contrast, was a maverick, a wildcard, a man who marched to the beat of his own drum.
“I think people map their own meaning onto your mustache. My mustache means something to me, but people are probably associating it with other mustaches they have feelings toward, so I think the range of reactions I get, which is pretty broad, reflects the broad role of mustaches in society.” —Ari Goldstein, Student at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
Confession: My facial hair mostly only grows in the mustache and goatee areas. I can grow a noticeable mustache and goatee in about two weeks, but the hair on my cheeks and jawline can’t keep up. I’d grow a full beard if I could, if I had the patience. Yet every time I try, it’s the same story. The mustache and the hairs on my chin overpower the rest of the hair on my face until I reach a point where I shave it all, save for the mustache. My father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers that I’ve seen pictures of have all worn mustaches and no beards at some point. So I suppose all of this had been determined for me a long time ago.
“There is no love without a mustache! The mustache is essential. It gives character to the face. It makes a man look gentle, tender, violent, a monster, a rake, enterprising!” —Guy de Maupassant, “The Mustache,” 1883.
Facial hair distribution is determined by “individual genetic variations in androgen receptor sensitivity within hair follicles,” which, really, is an ornate way of saying it’s all genetics. There’s very little one can do to affect mustache growth.
The last president of the United States to wear a mustache was William Howard Taft, who lost his bid for reelection to Woodrow Wilson in 1912. On March 4, 1913, Taft left office, and there hasn’t been a mustached leader in the White House since. Every year, on March 4, the American Mustache Institute celebrates Taft Day to remember our last mustache-wearing Commander in Chief.
The preferred spelling in the United States is “mustache.” In the UK, and in every other part of the English-speaking world, the preferred spelling is “moustache.” Thousands of years ago, in Hellenistic Greece, the word started as “mustax,” meaning “upper lip.” Medieval Latin transformed the word into “mustacchium.” The Italians, in the fourteenth century, called it “mustaccio.” Around 1580, the French started calling it “moustache,” and the name stuck. At some point or another, Americans decided to drop the “o,” and “mustache” became uniquely American. Mark Twain had a mustache, Teddy Roosevelt had a mustache, Clark Gable had a mustache. The moustache, then, was for men like Sir Charles James Napier, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Neville Chamberlain.
“As someone in my late twenties, it’s been this nice way of feeling fashionable while still feeling like I’m ascending into more mature adulthood… The mustache connotes authority, but also suggests a certain amount of silliness. It’s very masculine, but it’s also very flamboyant and quietly sort of queer-coded. The entire gender spectrum is obsessed with my mustache, as am I.” —Lucas Johnson, English Teacher from Brooklyn.
In the fall of 1966, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 350 students walked out of a school board meeting in a protest that became known as the Mustache Saga. The protest was directed toward Grand Rapids Public Schools’ systemically racist policies. One of the policies, a minor one, but ultimately what the whole event was named after, was the school district’s ban on mustaches for students. The policy, as protestors pointed out, mostly affected Black students.
Anybody with a mustache knows how domineering it becomes in terms of one’s physical characteristics. Without a mustache, I’m often described as “tall” or “brunette” or “the guy with coffee-stained teeth and a crooked smile.” But with a mustache, I’m always “the guy with a mustache.” You can be tall or short; you can be heavy or thin; you can have long hair or short hair or black hair or blonde or purple; you can have freckles or rosacea or clear skin; but none of this will matter if you have a mustache. The mustache becomes you.
“School officials agreed Wednesday to clarify South High’s code for student grooming but decided to maintain its policy against students wearing mustaches.” —Grand Rapids Press, October 26, 1966.
The unnamed narrator shaves his mustache after wearing it for over ten years in Emmanuel Carrère’s 1986 novel The Mustache. He decides to shave it on a whim, in a lighthearted attempt to prank his wife, Agnes. But when the narrator, now without a mustache, sees Agnes for the first time, she doesn’t comment on his missing facial hair. Friends and coworkers, too, don’t mention the missing mustache when they see the narrator. This leads the narrator to believe his wife is pulling a reverse prank on him in which she’s also involved all his friends and coworkers. When confronted about the prank, however, Agnes claims the narrator has never worn a mustache. The narrator then says he can prove he had a mustache from the pictures they took on their latest vacation in Java. Agnes tells her husband they’ve never been to Java, so there are no pictures. This triggers a crisis in the narrator’s mind that results in him fleeing to Hong Kong in an attempt to leave his old life in Paris behind, a life that he now sees was never what he thought it was. The novel ends with the unnamed narrator sitting in a warm bath, a straight razor with a tortoiseshell handle in his hand, and hacking away at his upper lip until it turns to bloody shreds of flesh and tissue.
Oh all of you poor single men
Don’t ever give up in despair
For there’s always a chance while there’s life
To capture the hearts of the fair
No matter what may be your age
You always may cut a fine dash
You will suit all the girls to a hair
If you’ve only got a mustache
A mustache, a mustache
If you’ve only got a mustache.
—Stephen Foster, “If You’ve Only Got a Mustache,” 1864.
In Ancient Sparta, men convicted of cowardice were forced to shave half their mustache. This was done to evoke unmistakable public stigma and shame.
The Pugilism Hypothesis explores how different biological evolutions in humans, particularly in men, have been altered by our pugilistic nature—millennia of hand-to-hand combat with fists and small objects. Facial hair, the theory goes, was grown to protect the face during physical competition or fighting. If the theory is true, which many biologists say it is not, the mustache’s raison d’être is, biologically speaking, taking a punch.
