The French embraced moustaches, whereupon their sworn enemies, the English, passed a law in 1447 forcing men to shave their upper lips. Next came Charlemagne, who pioneered the moustache into the Middle Ages. While the earliest evidence of moustaches is found on ancient Egyptians from 2650BC, it is likely that Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, was the first historical figure with a memorable tache. I reminded people of celebrities such as Tom Selleck, George Michael and Ron Jeremy. I spent my first few days being compared with both the good and evil. They are split between heroes - Gandhi, Einstein, Dali, Hendrix - and villains - Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, Genghis. These men - their taches conjured with a single name - further highlight the moustache's duality. The moustache's history can be told through the figures who have defined its various styles. It was clear the moustache had made the man, but what remained to be seen was whether, in one month, the man could make the moustache. People stared at me in malls, and strangers gazed at my upper lip as I talked. I was treated differently with a moustache, for reasons I became determined to uncover. It was Jekyll and Hyde: a simultaneous indicator of manliness and creepiness, harking back to history's great leaders and scumbags. The moustache grew its own personality - two, in fact. After a few days with a thin, scraggly growth, I realised what had started as a prank was turning into a fascinating social experiment. It sounded like fun, and I agreed to a moustache for a month. I decided to bridge the moustache culture gap when a colleague dared me to grow one. I began to wonder, then, how a simple strip of hair could be so revered in the East and so despised in the West? Why was it taboo for me to have one back home, but a rite of passage into manhood here? For them, it seemed, the tache was a point of pride and a harbinger of manliness. Moustaches were ubiquitous on Arab, Pakistani and Indian men alike. Where I'm from, young men don't have moustaches.īut when I moved to Abu Dhabi, my facial hair world view was challenged. Moustaches were entwined in my culture with police officers, professors, porn stars and other caricatures I did not want to be. Sometimes, I would shave a week's worth of stubble back to a moustache, laughing at myself in the mirror for a few minutes before finishing off the upper lip. This prejudice continued into my young adult years. I waited until I could sprout sideburns at 15 as my first facial hair experiment.
For reasons I did not understand, upper-lip growth spoke of all things sleazy for men under 40. The "dirty teen stache", as my group of friends back in Canada dubbed it, was strictly forbidden by social code. As a teenager, whenever I spotted whiskers sprouting on the sides of my lip, I shaved them quickly - dry, with one of my dad's used razors. The first piece of facial hair I could grow was a moustache - though I wouldn't dare do it. John Mather grew a moustache for a dare and, in doing so, opened a door to a fascinating world of cultural differences: what type of tache should he grow, what would suit him and would it just be a case of hair today, gone tomorrow?
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