Mustaches

Mustache arrived in English in the 1580s, by way of French moustache, from Italian mostaccio, from Medieval Greek moustakion — a diminutive of Doric Greek mustax, meaning upper lip. The Greek word was a place, not a feature. To say someone had a fine mustax did not mean fine hair; it meant a fine upper lip. We have been calling the hair by the name of its mounting plate for four hundred years.

The Old English word for mustache was cenep — related to cnafa, “boy,” from a time when only adult men grew them and the noun named the threshold. The Anglo-Saxon term was lost when the Greek-via-French word arrived. We kept the location instead of the threshold.

For fifty-six years, from 1860 to 1916, mustaches were compulsory in the British Army. Shaving the upper lip was a disciplinary offense. King’s Regulations Command No. 1695 stated the policy in one sentence.

The rationale was imperial. The 1854 Bombay Army General Order had encouraged mustaches for officers serving in India: beardless British faces were read as boyish by South Asian troops, eroding authority. The 1860 Adjutant-General’s order extended the rule Empire-wide and made it compulsory. The imperial face was, in effect, borrowing from the colonized — looking more like the sepoys it commanded.

The rule lasted fifty-six years and was killed by gas. Chlorine had been used by the German Army at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915. By mid-1916 the British Small Box Respirator was standardized; its rubber edge required a clean upper-lip seal. A Kaiser-style mustache could break the seal and let phosgene through. On October 6, 1916, Lieutenant-General Sir Cecil Frederick Nevil Macready, Adjutant-General to the Forces, signed the order rescinding the mandate. Macready, the standard accounts hold, disliked his own mustache and shaved it the morning the order was issued. The regulation was amended to delete five words: but not the upper lip.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in Walworth, South London, on April 16, 1889. Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on April 20, 1889. They were the same age within four days. Within a generation each had adopted the toothbrush mustache — a small, square trim across the philtrum, leaving the corners of the upper lip bare — and become, by it, two of the most recognized faces of the twentieth century.

Chaplin’s came first in popular consciousness. The Tramp debuted in February 1914 in the Keystone short Kid Auto Races at Venice. Chaplin later explained the choice of the small mustache pragmatically: a larger handlebar would have hidden his upper lip from the camera and dulled the comedy. He wanted the audience to see his expressions. The Tramp ran for over twenty-five years.

Hitler’s adoption is harder to date precisely. He had grown a Kaiser-style Kaiserbart — wide, ascending, waxed — as a young man before the war. The often-cited explanation for his trim, supported by some accounts and disputed by others, is that the German M1917 gas mask required a clean upper-lip seal, and the Kaiserbart broke it. He trimmed during his service. By the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 the toothbrush was fixed. The cultural historian Ron Rosenbaum has noted there is no documentary evidence Hitler modeled it on Chaplin; the convergence appears to be genuine accident.

Chaplin made The Great Dictator in 1940. He played both Adenoid Hynkel — a Hitler caricature, dictator of the fictional Tomania — and a Jewish barber who is mistaken for Hynkel because of the mustache, and who accidentally delivers a speech for peace at a rally. The film is the doppelganger structure executed at feature length. Chaplin later said that had he known the actual extent of the camps when he made the film, he would not have been able to make it comedic.

Mustache hair is terminal hair — coarse, pigmented, long-growing, distinct from the fine vellus fuzz on most of the body. Terminal facial-hair growth is androgen-dependent and is driven by dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, produced from testosterone by the enzyme 5α-reductase in the skin. DHT binds the androgen receptor on a facial-hair follicle and drives the follicle into terminal growth. Beard and mustache come in.

The same molecule does something different on the scalp of a genetically susceptible man. DHT in scalp follicles miniaturizes them — shortens the growth phase, narrows the hair shaft, eventually halts production. The clinical picture is androgenetic alopecia: male-pattern baldness. The same molecule that enlarged the follicles under the nose shrinks the follicles four inches higher. Same biochemistry, same head, opposite outcomes.

James Hamilton documented this in 1942, working with men who had been castrated before puberty in a Kansas mental hospital — then a common treatment for severe behavioral conditions. The castrates did not develop full beards and did not go bald. Both phenotypes were testosterone-dependent. Hamilton could not yet name DHT; the metabolite was characterized in the 1960s. The receptor specificity took another generation. Finasteride, the 5α-reductase inhibitor, was FDA-approved in 1992 for benign prostatic hyperplasia and in 1997 for hair loss. A subset of finasteride users report reduced beard density as a side effect — the predictable consequence of inhibiting the molecule that drives both.

Frida Kahlo painted approximately fifty-five self-portraits in her lifetime. Most show her with the faint mustache on her upper lip and the joined eyebrows above her nose — features she did not remove from her face and did not remove from the canvas. Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926, age nineteen). Self-Portrait with Necklace (1933). Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940). The mustache is rendered with the same care as the lips and the gaze.

The convention in upper-class Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s was rigorous concealment of female facial hair in formal portraiture — bleaching, plucking, or simply omitting in the painting. Kahlo’s refusal of the convention was deliberate, sustained, and political. The same hair, in the same place, can carry political weight that runs in either direction: marking masculine authority on a Victorian officer, marking refusal on Kahlo.

Salvador Dalí said he modeled his mustache on the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velázquez. He shaped it into a precise, ascending, dagger-thin handlebar — the tips waxed up into the “ten-past-ten” position, the angle of the hands of a clock at 10:10. The mustache became, over decades, possibly the most photographed individual mustache in art history.

The most concentrated record is the 1954 book Dalí’s Mustache. The photographer was Philippe Halsman, the great mid-century portraitist who shot 101 LIFE magazine covers — more than any photographer of his era — and who had collaborated with Dalí on Dalí Atomicus (1948), the famous photograph of Dalí, three cats, water, and a chair all suspended in mid-air. Dalí’s Mustache contains twenty-eight close-up portraits of the mustache configured as different objects: as the hands of a clock, as a pair of pirouetting figures, as paintbrushes, as a heart, as the letter S, as a dollar sign. The book is 128 pages. The mustache is the only model.

In Stoke-on-Trent in the 1860s, a Longton potter named Harvey Adams solved a Victorian gentleman’s specific problem. The fashion of the period — driven in part by the British Army mandate that had begun the same decade — was the waxed handlebar mustache, twisted upward with beeswax pomade into elaborate ascending shapes. The pomade melted at hot-tea temperature. A gentleman drinking his afternoon tea faced a choice: let the wax run into the cup and his mustache collapse, or hold the mustache up with his off-hand and drink awkwardly.

Adams designed a teacup with a fixed semicircular ledge across the inside of the rim. A small half-moon opening below the ledge let the tea pass. The mustache rested on the ledge, above the steam and the liquid line. The cup solved the problem. Adams was a Longton potter and a local councillor; he retired wealthy.

By the 1870s mustache cups were standard upper-middle-class wedding gifts. By the 1880s they were being produced in Germany, France, the U.S., and Japan, in hand-painted and gilt-edged variants. They had a built-in laterality problem — a right-handed cup did not work for left-handed drinkers — and left-handed mustache cups, produced in smaller numbers, are now significantly rarer collectibles. The cup declined sharply after 1916 and was essentially obsolete by 1930. It is possibly the only piece of dishware ever engineered specifically around a facial-hair fashion. When the fashion ended, the dishware became obsolete in about a decade.

The reason is structural. Recognition algorithms identify a face by mapping distances between landmarks — eye-to-eye, eye-to-nose, nose-to-mouth, jaw line — and a mustache obscures one of the most stable landmarks, the philtrum, the vertical groove between nose and upper lip. Adversarial attacks on face recognition are usually engineered: in 2016, Mahmood Sharif and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon published “Accessorize to a Crime,” demonstrating that printed eyeglass frames with specific adversarial patterns could fool commercial face recognition into matching the wearer to a chosen target identity. The mustache is the biological analog: harder to engineer specific impersonation, but reliably degrading match accuracy is simply a matter of growing.

The same biology that the British Army required for authority in 1860, and that the gas mask required to be removed in 1916, now degrades the algorithms that recognize a face at the customs gate.

In the early hours of July 20, 2017, a small team of forensic scientists and embalmers raised Salvador Dalí’s body from the crypt beneath the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres. He had been buried there twenty-eight years and six months earlier, in January 1989, in a tomb he had designed for himself in the museum he had designed for himself. A Madrid court had ordered the exhumation. A Spanish tarot reader named María Pilar Abel Martínez had filed a paternity suit; she claimed her mother had been Dalí’s lover in Cadaqués in the 1950s and that she was therefore entitled to a share of the estate Dalí had willed to the Spanish state.

The embalmer who had originally prepared Dalí’s body in 1989, Narcís Bardalet, was present at the exhumation. When the casket was opened, he gave a quote that ran in international headlines.

DNA samples were collected from Dalí’s hair, nails, and bones. The result, returned in September 2017, was negative. María Pilar Abel Martínez was not Dalí’s biological daughter. The body was returned to the crypt. Abel was ordered to pay the costs of the exhumation. The estate remained intact with the Spanish state.

The mustache had outlasted everything else.

In November 2003 two friends were drinking at the Gypsy Bar on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Travis Garone and Luke Slattery noticed that nobody around them had a mustache. They wondered, in the way of pub conversations, whether they could bring it back for a single month. They drafted rules — clean shave on November 1, grow through the month, no trimming — and emailed about thirty friends with the subject line Are you man enough to be my man? Garone designed the first logo. They charged each participant ten dollars. The first year was a personal bet, not a charity.

In 2004 they returned to the concept and tied it to prostate cancer awareness; Slattery had been inspired by a friend’s mother who was fundraising for breast cancer. The Movember Foundation was formally registered in 2007. The campaign spread out of Melbourne in the late 2000s. By 2010 it was international.

A Greek word that means upper lip. An Arabic word that means drinker. A Russian word that does not distinguish a man’s mustache from a cat’s whiskers. A Hindi oath sworn by the mustache. A British Army regulation from 1860 forbidding the shaving of the upper lip, written to make British officers look more like the South Asian sepoys they were commanding, and abolished fifty-six years later by Lt-Gen Sir Nevil Macready because a Kaiser-style mustache broke the seal on a chlorine-gas respirator. Two men born four days apart in April 1889 in two countries, each of whom adopted the same uncommon square trim across the philtrum, and each of whom became, by it, one of the most recognized faces of the twentieth century. A signature destroyed by a borrowing. A safety razor commercialized by a man named Gillette in 1901 that killed the political mustache in American politics within a decade. The last U.S. president with facial hair handing the office in 1913 to a clean-shaven successor. Twenty-two more clean-shaven presidents and counting. The molecule that grows the hair on a man’s upper lip is the same molecule that bales his crown. A potter in Stoke-on-Trent designing a teacup with a ledge to hold the wax up above the steam. A painter in Coyoacán refusing to remove the upper-lip hair from her self-portraits. A photographer who shot 101 LIFE covers and a painter who shaped his mustache into a clock and they together made a book in 1954 with twenty-eight portraits of a single piece of facial hair as different objects. A forensic team exhuming Dalí’s body in 2017 to settle a paternity suit and finding the mustache still curled in 10-past-10 position twenty-eight years after death. A facial-recognition algorithm that drops twenty to forty percentage points of accuracy when the subject grows or removes one. Two men in a Melbourne pub in 2003 who decided to bring the mustache back for one month, and twenty-one years later their joke has raised over a billion dollars for men’s health.

A strip of hair under the nose. The mustache itself has not changed in two hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens. What changes is what someone with authority — an empire, a chemical weapon, an algorithm, a tea-drinker, a painter, a comedian, a fascist, a tarot reader, a pub-goer — wants to do with the face.