What do mustaches stand for

Mustaches and beards have been utilized to depict villains, which was particularly useful in distinguishing evil twins from their more favorable family members. These whiskers are not just a visual tool, but a theme borrowed from Christianity.

Allan Peterkin, author of the One Thousand Mustaches: A Cultural History of the Mo , told Patheos , that the mustache has always been used in religious literature as a symbol of evil. The popular image of Satan was modeled after the Pan, a Greek god associated with wildness and sexuality, who has goat-like features. This included a mustache as a part of a goatee that is present in most renditions of the devil today. Current data shows such creepiness may be a matter of where you live, with mustaches being the more mainstreamed in Nevada, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest, where they outrank beards.

To Oldstone-Moore, the creepiness really comes down to how the mustache looks itself. A bushy mustache is more old school, but a thin, long, and dark mustache is seen as more dangerous, and more likely to be associated with risk-taking or non-conformity.

Dewey, who ran in and Politicians learned from his losses and have tended to keep it clean ever since. When the value of masculinity in a culture shift, so do to attitudes towards unmitigated displays of it. The issue is that manliness is not valued in the same way as it was in generations prior, and showing it off to achieve dominance may not be as effective as a result. When performative masculinity no longer has an audience, mustaches are openly mocked.

Hair follicles on the upper lips of men never really became creepy, but mustaches are so much more than that. That will always have the potential to become creepy, depending on where you live, who you ask, and if you look like Burt Reynolds. More disorienting than distasteful, more than anything mustaches are merely the measure of a man wants men to see how manly he is.

Sign up for the Fatherly newsletter to get original articles and expert advice about parenting, fitness, gear, and more in your inbox every day. Please try again. Give us a little more information and we'll give you a lot more relevant content. It even had a cameo in the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Fourteen mustaches, twelve beards, nine beard-mustache hybrids, and a clean-shaven option. But they have come up with a best evolutionary guess that makes a lot of sense, if you take a step back to see the forest for the trees—or the beard for the whiskers, as it were. As it turns out, facial hair is not a functional physical human trait in the way we thought it was for many years.

In fact, of all the physical features on the human body—including other kinds of hair—facial hair is the only one that is purely or primarily ornamental. Just take a look at what the rest of our hair does for us:. But facial hair? In the early days of studying this kind of stuff, evolutionary biologists thought it might serve thermoregulatory or prophylactic purposes similar to body hair and pubic hair. Beards and mustaches are around the mouth, after all, and the mouth takes in food and other particles that might carry disease.

It all makes sense when you look at it that way. If facial hair were meant to perform important functions, it would be present across both sexes.

What signal does facial hair send? Taken together, these signals confer their own brand of elevated status to the men with the most majestic mustaches or the biggest, burliest beards. The signal that facial hair sends also tends to be stronger and more reliable between males, who are more commonly rivals, than it is between males and females, who are more commonly partners.

In guppies, for example, males with a unique combination of colored spots mate more often and are preyed upon less. Tom Selleck sported one of the most memorable moustaches of the s in the television series Magnum, PI Rex Features.

What Selleck made sexy, other actors — Eddie Murphy, Dick van Dyke — tried to emulate, but none could top the Magnum moustache. When it was measured for the Guinness Book of Records, in , it reached to over 14 ft 4. Tom Selleck and Ram Singh Chauhan aside, it still took a brave — and thick-skinned — man to grow a moustache at the end of the 20th Century. That was all to change after , the year in which Movember was born.

The idea of being sponsored to grow a moustache was born. As Movember went global, men looked to the Golden Age of Hollywood for inspiration. Every ensuing Movember has witnessed the moustache receives another boost in popularity and many hirsutely challenged men can be seen starting to cultivate their growth several months in advance.

But how long will the mo-fest last? History has shown that facial hair fashions can be as mercurial as the platform shoe and high-waisted trousers, but for the moment the moustache is well and truly back. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

The moustache: A hairy history. Share using Email. By Lucinda Hawksley 21st October Hair today The moustache had become the symbol of the modern man. Around the BBC.