Martin - A gentlemans guide to beard and moustache management

With special thanks to the illustrators of this book: Lindsey Smith, for the line drawings in the chapter A Guide to Beard & Moustache Styles and the animal drawings in The World of Beards & Moustaches; and Gwen Burns, for the illustrations in A Short History of Facial Hair, When Facial Hair Goes Wrong, The Hall of Fame and the depiction of the worlds longest beard .

Moustache Styles

Beard Styles

Choosing a Shape

Choosing a Style

The World Beard & Moustache Championships

Alternatives to the Beard

The Worst Facial Hair Ever

Great Moustache Wearers Through History

Great Bearded Men Through History

Essential Equipment

Washing & Trimming Beards & Moustaches

Washing your Beard or Moustache

Trimming your Beard or Moustache

Hints & Tips

Waxing & Styling

Get a Grip: Three Lost Grooming Treasures

Quotes about Beards & Moustaches

Beard & Moustache Records

Beards & Moustaches in Nature

T HERE IS an old proverb that says it is manners that make a man. While a solid command of your Ps and Qs may cut it during tea with your grandmother, in the real world we all know that facial hair is the true mark of the alpha male.

Beards and moustaches distinguish men from boys and mercifully men from women. They create a direct and hot-blooded connection with our dinosaur-wrestling ancestors and demonstrate a dedication to personal style that would leave Beau Brummel speechless.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb to beard as to boldly confront or challenge someone formidable and in this book weve done just that. We have defied slovenly convention to raise an overflowing glass to the noble art of pogonotrophy. In these pages you will find beards that define the spirit of adventure and academia that made men great, and moustaches of such sophistication that they could make even the most hard-hearted of ladies swoon.

Whether you favour a French Fork, a Donegal, an American Standard or a Fu Manchu, beards and moustaches be they waxed or natural make a powerful statement about the kind of man you are.

We offer you these grooming secrets in the hope of ensuring that a new generation of hirsute gods will walk the earth once more.

F OR AS long as man has grown facial hair, the beard has been with us. Join us now as we take a journey through the history of pogonotrophy throughout the ages.

One likes to think that when our earliest ancestors crawled from the primordial ooze, they wore a Goatee at the very least. Our earliest records of the state of mens faces probably come from cave paintings. Unfortunately, the representations of human beings found in these ancient images are usually symbolic, so we dont really know if prehistoric man wore a beard or not. But as these early artists took great care to describe every element of the world around them and there are no drawings of stone razors, mud shaving foam or twig hair tongs, it seems safe to assume that early man was bearded.

Around 300 BC man started shaving with flint. Indeed, archaeologists have found evidence of men using a variety of unpleasant tools to remove their whiskers, including clam shells and sharks teeth. This must have been extremely tricky and frankly quite painful. Nonetheless, a formal portrait from ancient Iran from around this time shows a man with a magnificent moustache riding a horse while no doubt wincing from screaming razor burn.

In the early classical civilisations we first see the deliberate styling of a mans facial hair, from an unruly and unchecked growth hacked at with sharpened stones, to a refined symbol of manhood, wisdom and prestige.

In the Homeric epics of ancient Greece beards were celebrated and portrayed as a badge of virility. When asking for royal favour, it became a form of entreaty to touch the beard of your king. A smooth face was condemned as a sign of effeminacy to the point where the terrifying macho Spartans took to punishing those they considered to be cowards by shaving off their beards.

The ancient Egyptians, on the other hand, were a bit on the fey side and didnt much care for face fuzz. Copper and gold razors used by the pharaohs have been unearthed in Egyptian tombs. While it may have been fashionable to be soft-cheeked, to give the Egyptians their effeminate due they did at least try to enhance the hair they did have on their chins usually with henna-based dyes or plaits laced with gold thread to show their ranking in society. Ultimately, the only beards that were really valued by the Egyptians were fake ones, and queens, kings and sometimes even sacred cows took to wearing ornate chin covers fashioned from precious metals, known as postiches.

Luckily the two next great civilisations to come along in Mesopotamia and Persia were far more in tune with their bearded selves. Their upper classes grew their beards long and took great pains to style them, using special oils and heated tongs to create long patterned tresses and decorative ringlets.

Such unchecked growth in the popularity of beards could not continue, and by the time of Alexander the Great it would all go wrong. Legend has it that the Macedonian custom of shaving the face smooth was introduced when Alexander was preparing to fight against the impressively bearded Persians. When one of his officers brought him word that the army was ready for battle, Alexander promptly decreed that all his soldiers be shaved. It has been argued that he feared their beards could be grabbed in combat by their enemies; however, it seems more likely that Alexander who was just 19 when he became King of Macedonia probably couldnt grow a beard himself and didnt want to be embarrassed by his hirsute comrades.

Beard-wearers were now faced with a double jeopardy. The first piece of bad news was that this fit of teenage pique was taken seriously by subsequent Macedonian kings and the practice of shaving spread throughout their empire. The second piece of bad news was that the Macedonian empire consisted of the whole known world. They even passed laws against growing a beard in the great metropolises of Rhodes and Byzantium. The only excluded group was the philosophers, who retained their beards as a badge of their profession proving without doubt that the stroking of a beard is essential for truly deep thought.