Handlebar Mustaches

June 30, 2010, By Josh Katzowitz 3 comments

Josh Katzowitz

A buddy of mine started growing a mustache about a month ago. He’s blonde and fair-skinned, so naturally, his facial hair is light and whimsical. Sure, he looks a little creepy, but when I asked him why he had grown just a mustache – nothing more, nothing less – he said, ‘Because it’s full of awesomeness.”

Hard to argue a point like that.

It’s also tough to dispute the fact that mustaches are making a comeback. Forget the goatees (though that’s how I sport my facial hair) and forget the full-length beard (though that’s how Mastodon and Fleet Foxes rock their faces). Mustaches, like John Holmes in the 1970s, are getting to be pretty huge. It’s not just for Geraldo and Tom Selleck anymore. It’s not just for my father, who I’ve never seen without the mustache that’s gone, over the years, from bushy-tailed to a fu-manchu. Now, it’s for everyone – for men and (sometimes less fortunately) for women.

Ask John Stossel, who co-anchors 20/20 on ABC.

“The mustache,” he told the Associated Press in a story that ran in April 2010, “changed my life.”

So, if you think growing a little peach fuzz above your lip is going to make you stand out from the crowd, think again. But if you really want people buzzing, do something different. Do something ridiculous. Go all Rollie Fingers on your face.

That’s right. I’m suggesting you grow yourself a handlebar mustache. Be a real man. Be a real man like Rod Littlewood, the president of the Handlebar Club – an international club, based out of London since 1947, for men with handlebar mustaches.

“I’m 55 now and decided to grow my 'stache about 35 years ago as a sales aid,” Littlewood wrote in an e-mail. “I was in sales then and used it as a unique selling point. I stood out from the crowd of other salesmen.”

You know the kind of mustache he’s speaking about, right? It’s the kind worn by Fingers, who, in his heyday, had a mustache that exploded off the corner of his lips like a curveball and boomerang combined. It was perfect. The same with Salvador Dali, who had a relatively thin mustache across his upper lip but then could wax the length of it past his eyebrows.

And much like Littlewood – who, at his peak, had a mustache that measured about five feet from tip to tip. Eventually, he had to shear down his facial hair, because if there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s for the mustache to look unruly.

“It was taking too long to groom in the morning,” said Littlewood, who ends his e-mails with the phrase “Yours to the last whisker,” entirely appropriate for the president of a mustache club. “One just cannot go out looking scruffy. I cut it back to a much more manageable length, and now, it takes only a few seconds to apply a little wax before I go out.”

That brings us to a good point: how do you grow and maintain such a follicle adventure?

You’ll probably never get to the point where your mustache is as long as Danny Devito is tall, but if you want to add a little curl to your life, here’s the best way to accomplish it.

Purchase some mustache wax – preferably, one of the ingredients will be beeswax – and when you’re getting ready for the day, apply it to the middle of the mustache. Then, using a mustache comb, spread the wax throughout your facial hair. Make sure the hairs bind together and then shape it as you see fit.

Some connoisseurs prefer to use three different kinds of waxes – a general wax that’s comparable to hair conditioner that keeps the mustache soft, a stiffer wax to fasten the hair together at the ends and the third to use in the middle to give it some body and to continue training your hair to grow outward and not south toward your lips.

Maybe you don’t want to grow a two-yard mustache and perhaps you don’t want to be mistaken for a Civil War general, and that’s understandable. But be a different sort of man. Grow it out and make it yours. Be like Fingers. Like Dali. Like Littlewood.

Be full of awesomeness. 

“If you grow one, you may need to put up with a certain amount of 'mickey taking' from your peer group,” Littlewood said. “However, if you are strong-willed, you can be proud to be different. It will be well worth the effort.”

Josh Katzowitz lives in Atlanta and covers the NFL for CBSSports.com. He is a featured contributor to ManoftheHouse.com and author of the book, Bearcats Rising. He's currently working on a book about pro football that is scheduled to be released in 2012.