Wolf Gnards

Or Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Mustaches *but Were Afraid to Ask

What is the new fascination with beards and mustaches? They’re everywhere. Mustaches on fingers, mustaches on glasses, mustaches on a stick. I even own a mustache on a vase, why? Who knows, but it’s awesome. The mustache: first invited by Massimo Mostaccio after a nasty forking accident that may or may not have involved the spaghett. The mustache: marker of our times from the Hitler toothbrush of Nazi propaganda to the curly upward bend of Salvador Dali’s art (and his art is his mustache). The mustache: coverer of lips, holder of food. But what is it about the mustache? What is it that moves us? That binds us? That urges to grow such beautiful caterpillars (in mustache-world butterflies become caterpillars).

Fig. A

The clean shaven represents youth and vitality. The beard represents experience and wisdom. The mustache? Perhaps, somewhere in between. If you study the history of facial hair, you’ll see how facial hair runs in cycles. In the Renaissance, innocence was all the rage (so, clean shaven it was). The 16th century brought the search to be an ideal man (beard). The Baroque period, manly men were thought ridiculous and made fun of (check out the muscles on that loser), so no beard. Beards slowly came back into style then Louis XIV shaved his beard and no one grew one for 150 years. The point? Facial hair and sexuality are entwined, it’s not just about customs and styles, but being male and more importantly covering up one’s femininity. So, all the girls with mustaches on the fingers, are they secretly asserting their dominance or just being cute?

This mustache/sexuality link, of course, leads us to the porn-star mustache. The porn-stache is not only the symbol of the pornography industry, but the symbol of America in 1970’s. But do porn stars grow bad mustaches to demonstrate just how unfeminine they are, and if they’re so masculine why aren’t the mustaches better? However, the porn-stache isn’t simply covering up the feminine on a psychological level, but literally displaying your masculinity for all the world to see. Looking through the works of Leonardo da Vinci, his Vitruvian Mustache (Fig. A) shows that the human mustache is in direct proportion with the genitals. Since the invention of pants, men have found it difficult to expose themselves: belt buckles and buttons can be tricky and zippers can be even dangerous. Women have cleavage, men only have mustaches to display themselves. This means today’s modern mustache states “Yes, I have a penis,” and the beard is the overcompensating, which means, “I have a penis, but please don’t look at.”

How is a porn-star mustache different from a regular mustache? Fig. 2 demonstrates that the porn-stache is inversely related to whisker sparsity and greasiness. So, the thinner the mustache the less greasy the mustache needs to be, but the thicker the mustache, more grease is needed to qualify as a porn-stache. For instance, while Prince has as thin a mustache as John Holmes, it is far too greasy to be a porno mustache, and while the Tom Selleck mustache may be of similar thickness to Ron Jeremy, it lacks the greasiness to be a true porn-stache. So, a porn mustache falls between equal parts thin/dry and thick/greasy.

Porn-Stache Grease to Thickness Chart

Fig. 2

Follow up:

Top Non-porn Porn Mustaches

Many non-pornstars have porn-staches. Here are some of the best celebrity porn mustaches (in no particular order because they’re all winners):

Vincent Price

Ryan Gosling

Pharrell

Charles Bronson

Adam Morrison

Nicolas Cage

John Waters

Rivers Cuomo

Dennis Franz

Thomas Lennon

Orlando Bloom

Mr. Belvedere

Brad Pitt

John Oats

Jason Lee

Stanley Tucci