Mustaches why popular

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. This is a huge competitive advantage. The trait goes from fighting for its life to being the life of the party.

The downside is that the competitive advantage can result in overpopulation of others with the same trait very quickly, because of all the getting-it-on the very interesting-looking guppy does—which means it loses its rarity and becomes common. Not to worry, nature has a solution for that: As more guppies bear that same trait, it leads to a decrease in interest from mates and an increase in attention from predators.

As gay identity and politics began to penetrate pop culture, we saw the emergence of the Castro Clone, often wearing a heavy mustache: a reference to the working Joe.

The aesthetic spread throughout the country. So on one hand the mustache was aligned with the status quo think firemen and cops , while on the other it became shorthand and occasionally handlebar for the sexual outsider: the swinger, the porn star, the gay man. But generally speaking, in modern American history, the mustache has been a consistency, not a telegraph of any mode of temporal identity, for Black men.

At the same time as Star Wars , there was Magnum, P. The Alex Trebek, if you will. More than a decade later, as that generation moves into management and ownership positions, the result is a more open world, in terms of the facial hair we can sport.

Facial hair experts argue that the mustache reappears at times when masculinity is under threat. But what happens when masculinity is in a process of being redefined, as is gender? Contemporary masculinity has been redefined in so many ways, with far-reaching implications. One of them is that nowadays, your mustache gets to be less of a signpost, and more of a mustache, than ever. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Every 'Bond' Film Ever, Ranked. The future was looking smooth-chinned and moustachioed.

Meanwhile the moustache was aided in its war of dominance against the beard, by a different type of conflict. Yet for those who yearned to grow a moustache, times were hard — only certain ranks in the military were permitted to grow moustaches.

When the war ended, a moustache revolution began. The moustache had become the symbol of the modern man. In , a young Agatha Christie published her first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introducing Hercule Poirot and his famous moustaches.

In Hollywood, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Ronald Colman sported moustaches that could make a heroine swoon — but as the world entered an economic depression, the moustache-on-the-street became an endangered species. In Spain, the moustache was entering the world of Surrealism. After World War II toothbrush moustaches — unsurprisingly — fell out of fashion, but a new style of facial hair was being twirled with panache.

The handlebar moustache was the symbol of the bravest heroes of the war: the fighter pilots. This was the inaugural meeting of The Handlebar Club, which still thrives. Tom Selleck sported one of the most memorable moustaches of the s in the television series Magnum, PI Rex Features. But even that association backfired: whenever the media ran a negative story about Dov Charney, former chief executive of American Apparel, they used an image of Charney with his tache — this despite the fact that his dates back to and he only had it for less than nine months.

Things took a turn for the worse in the late noughties when the moustache was co-opted by Generation Paperchase appearing naff-stalgically on mugs, notebooks and temporary finger tattoos, the new — shudder — Keep Calm and Carry On. Stylist and music consultant Phil Bush first grew his moustache in , coincidentally the year Movember started. Pop culture aside, perhaps the main sticking point is this comparison between the two.