I didn’t shave over the weekend. In preparation for work this morning, I shaved off everything except for the mustache area - just above the upper lip. I think I’m going to let this puppy grow out for awhile. After all, isn’t it every young man’s right to try to grow a mustache at least once? (FTR I’m in my mid 20s.)
I’m less concerned about looking stupid with a mustache and more concerned that I won’t be able to pull it off at all. (For the love of Og, nothing looks stupider than one of those ‘bad’ teenage mustaches.) I’ve got fairly light colored facial hair, and not a real heavy growth - no noticeable 5 o’clock shadow, and you’d need to be within 10 or 15 feet of me the next morning to notice that I hadn’t shaved the previous day.
So, mustache growers of the SDMB, when you undertook your quest:
-Did you ever have any doubt that you could grow one?
-When did you realize your attempt(s) were going to fail or succeed?
-Just for the heck of it, how old were you?
I invite the ladies to share their observations about men in their lives who’ve tried to grow mustaches, and/or whether they think mustaches are hot or just stupid.
I never really thought about it one way or another. I just shaved that area a little the first time and then let it go. I shave it every month or two, but beyond that I don’t think about it.
For me, facial hair is like grass. The only time I think about it is when it becomes too long and it doesn’t take any effort to grow, just to keep it down.
A buddy and roommate of mine in college was at the supermarket buying beer late one night. The supermarket, since it sat on college property, was almost always occupied with attractive young ladies preparing to go out for the night, all dolled up in their most revealing clothes. As he stood in line a couple girls in front of him kept turning around to look at him, then smiled and turned away whispering to each other. My roommate returned to the apartment with this story about how a bunch of chicks at the supermarket were “diggin’ him”, but I could only reply “dude, they were probably laughing at your ridiculous mustache”. He’d forgotten that he’d left the mustache as a joke to freak out his girlfriend.
I think young guys look weird with only a 'stache, not accompanied by goatee or beard. Just 1 guy’s opinion.
I was too young to have any doubt. It was something that I just sort of did, when I was a freshman in high school. I had a Serious Mustache from my sophomore year on. (Made me look older, I thought, which was partly true, since substitutes would occasionally wonder why a faculty member was sitting in; but there was a skeevy quality also. When I look at my yearbook now I think “most likely to commit unnatural acts with a large gourd.”)
Anyway, a couple of months after I started at a new college, I looked in the mirror and thought, Holy shit, I look like my dad. Zip-zop, my face was ripped to shreds. But clean.
Stayed clean-shaven for many years, though I periodically grew facial hair for some plays in which I performed. (I can produce a full beard in a little under two weeks.) I have a goatee now; I call it my “winter coat,” despite having first regrown it about five years ago.
-Did you ever have any doubt that you could grow one?
Not once I started in earnest.
-When did you realize your attempt(s) were going to fail or succeed?
I think it was when it started to stab my lips that I decided it was working.
-Just for the heck of it, how old were you?
20.
For the record, I think the upper lip is a really stupid place to grow hair, especially thick bristly fast-growing hair. Women who are curious about this point might pretend to eat with the middle of their scalps and see what I’m talking about. If that’s not good enough, hang a feather so it tickles your nose, too. But I break out terribly if I shave my beard, and my wife gives me crap for looking like C. Everett Koop or Lincoln if I keep the beard and shave the stupid moustache.
If you have no discernable 5;00 shadow and your beard seems sparse to start with, it’s going to take a while to get that 'stache out. I know, because I have a lightish color beard (blondish, with some browns and reds) and an almost perfect platinum coloured stache. Plus, my facial hair isn’t coarse, it’s more like my head hair. Soft.
When I did have a mustache, I let it grow out til it was quite long and combed it, yep, that’s right, combed it into a fu man chu. A few times, I let my beard grow out, too. Whenever I had the full package, I looked like a completely different person. And a totally different group of people found me attractive. I stayed pretty tan throughout that time, so the contrast effect no doubt played some part.
It takes about a week for me to get the lip hair long enough to be visible at a distance, unless I have a good tan going like in Summer, then 'it’s just a couple of days. A full day for the same from my beard.
First time: 19?
When did I know success or failure: non sequitur for me, I just did it til I got the look I wanted.
Doubts: honestly don’t remember any. Even if it was very, very blonde, I could feel it, others noticed, etc…
If you’re fair haired and fair skinned, you might be easily dissappointed in it. If you have some darkness to your skin color, even an early 'stache will show up for you, just like dark hair does on pale skin.
Currently clean shaven. Mostly. I haven’t shaved in 4 days now and half considered doing it again. Probably won’t, tho. It’s easier (for me) to just keep it whacked off.
First time for me was mid 20s. I still have the photo somewhere, which I think makes me look like Burt Reynolds. Everyone else thinks I look a wally. Tried it again in my early 30s, and felt it worked like a charm. Same disappointing reaction from everyone else. Never once heard a comment about “the hot guy with the 'tache”. When I shaved it off, no one noticed.
Although I’m dark haired (apart from where it’s gone grey - premature greyness runs in the family), most of my stubbly growth occurs under my chin, and the least on my upper lip.
Will probably take another shot at a moustache when I enter the male menopause and trade my Echo in for a Celica.
When I was 19 or 20, I started to grow my hair long. Long hair on me, unfortunately, forms into a girlish page boy 'do. After clerks and gas station attendants called me “miss” (even though I’m 6ft. 4) I grew a moustache. I ditched the long hair, once I realized how stupid it looked. I haven’t shaved my upper lip since.
When my county went through the hoopla of its 150th year, men were encouraged to grow facial hair. I grew big sideburns, and I tried to do a Fu Manchu. The Fu didn’t work, because a little patch at each end of my mouth won’t grow hair.
My moustache has always contained 5 colors; black, brown, blond, red, and white. I’m 55, and the white is starting to outnumber the other colors.
I tried when I was in my mid-20’s, but I have very light facial hair and it’s slow-growing to boot so it took over a month to fill in. The hair was dirty-blonde (same as my eyebrows) and it was fairly thin but coarse.
I kept it for a year because some people said that it made my baby face look older, but not one noticed when I got tired of it and shaved it off.
i stopped shaving right after high school. probably just wanted a new identity after my uneventful years in my hometown. i couldn’t wait to get out of there, and being that i had been shaving since like 5th grade, a beard was a quick and drastic change. plus, it appealed to my early morning laziness.
i never really had a mustache without a beard, though. sometimes i’ll trim my beard down short and leave the mustache longer. and every couple of years i forget how wierd i look without a beard and shave. i usually leave the mustache on for a day to annoy my girlfriend. it can be quite the 'stache. but she says it makes me look like a “gay cop.”
but the mustache’s time is over, i think. the 70’s seemed to be the heyday, with burt reynolds and tom selleck proudly sporting their lipwarmers. sadly, i was too young, or more technically, not alive, so i’ll have to just look back at those days and think of what could have been.
I’ve had one since high school. Mostly because I have a heavy beard anyway and it grew so fast that I always looked like I had one; it was a pain to shave, and I was semi-allergic to shaving cream and every time I shaved in the morning I sneezed continuously (not a great idea when you’re wielding a razor).
Never got a lot of comments as to how it looked one way or another. Looking back in pictures, it looks weird. But that was the 70’s, so all pictures look like fashion disasters.
Mostly I keep it for the convenience – it’s really nice not to have to shave that area.
I never had any doubt that I could grown my moustache. I was 19 when I grew my first one. I was working as a camp counselor and grew it over the course of about 2 weeks there. My parents hated it, but what were they going to do? I shaved it off after about a year, much to my parent’s jubilation. At 21 I was dating the woman who would become my wife. She said she would really like me to grow it back, so I did, and I haven’t shaved it off since.
When I grew it out, both times it took about 2 weeks for it to really start looking like a real moustache. Then it took about another week for me to get used to having that hairy feeling on my upper lip.
My moustache definately makes me look older. If I were to shave it off, I would look 10 years younger (I’m 36), so maybe in another 10 years I will consider shaving it off.
I tried growing my moustache twice. Once in my late 20s, and it was not successful - six long hairs on either side of my upper lip. So I shaved it.
Then, on a whim, I tried it again about twelve years ago. That time it came in very well, and I have had it ever since. I will be 49 in a couple weeks.
I knew I had achieved Moustache-hood when my sister remarked on it, about two weeks after I started growing it. I have shaved it off once or twice, but my daughter likes me better with it, so here I am, combing breakfast off my upper lip.
I had a noticeable moustache when I was 14. Shaved it for a few years, then let it grow my senior year in high school.
For several years after that, I’d grow it, then shave it, then grow it, eventually deciding to keep it when I reached my late 20s. I grew a beard about 18 years ago and am sticking with that.
Yeah I had some doubts about getting one. I’m not a particularly hairy guy, and oddly enough my facial hair is particularly sparse on the left half of my face (have no idea why). I was kind of a late bloomer when it came to getting facial hair, I must have been 19 or 20 when it started coming in. Even now, with a pseudo-goatee (it is pseudo because the mustache part barely connects to the beard part, particularly on the, yes, left side :mad: )
Oddly enough while my hair is very fine and only semi-wavy, my facial hair is extremely coarse and thick. This makes it kind of difficult to groom.
I always wanted a really thick beard, something I could grow down to my knees. I suppose it is a greener grass thing, because I’ve had my beard/mustache goatee thing going on for at least four months and it hasn’t really gotten any longer or denser But when I shave it all off it makes me feel like I look like I’m only sixteen :smack:
I am a “grows in in 2 weeks” kinda guy, too. Over long breaks, I don’t shave the goatee area and get a full one in. (my cheeks and neck are far easier to shave and not shaving there makes me itchy, so the goatee is the perfect combo of laziness and comfort! )
I am also of the mind that a mustache alone is very '70’s or fireman - and it only looks good on about 1% of the men who have one…
Upon further reflection, both in the mirror and away, I think I’m going to have to agree with wasson and grow out a beard as well.
Actually I think I’m going to wipe clean the four days I’ve been working on and recontinue this project in a week. On Thursday I’m going on a long weekend trip with my family, and if my sister sees me with a half grown mustache/beard, I’ll never hear the end of it.
And there’s no way I’ll pick up any chicks in Vegas with 6 days of stubble above my lip.
Beginning after senior year of high school, I would go one week without shaving my upper lip, each year, just to see what would happen. (What happened for about 10 years was that I walked around for a week looking like I’d forgotten to wash my upper lip.) Finally, the summer before I turned 29, at the end of one week I had an actual mustache. (It was not what I had wanted, of course, the beginnings of a Tom Selleck or Gene Shallit growth, but it was clearly a mustache and not the previous night’s chocolate milk.) About a week later, I discovered that since my upper lip did not have hair growth “deep” enough to brush straight down without looking odd, if I brushed it sideways it looked real, and eventually I twisted up the ends in a modified handlebar where it has stayed for nearly the last quarter century.
But when I shave it all off it makes me feel like I look like I’m only sixteen :smack:
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