<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Published in Esquire&amp;#039;s Spring 2012 Big Black Book, on newsstands now. Or buy it here. My father has had a mustache, off and on, through most of my life. he shaved it once, when I was six, and when he walked into the living room, I screamed because I thought a stranger had broken into our house. That was how I learned that a man&amp;#039;s facial hair means something. Hemingway with a beard was a different animal than Hemingway with a mustache, and picturing a clean-shaven Hemingway is like picturing a clean-shaven Santa Claus. Dal\u00ED sans mustache was basically a suburban accountant. Ditto Burt Reynolds. For those guys (and my dad), facial hair wasn&amp;#039;t a matter of style \u2014 it was a part of their identity. Once you figured it out and made it your own, you didn&amp;#039;t mess with it too much. But that was then. Today, with a lot of men trying new and different things with the colors, patterns, and cuts of our clothes, more and more of us are putting down our razors and letting our facial hair grow. Not because having a beard is trendy (it&amp;#039;s not) or because having a mustache makes you look cool (it probably won&amp;#039;t) or because having a goatee imbues the wearer with unquestioned authority (obviously), but because, to paraphrase the prevailing attitude in men&amp;#039;s style right now, why the hell not? For the reigning champion of facial hair, Brad Pitt, every adventure in a beard, mustache, or goatee \u2014 like wearing go-to-hell pants, a velvet smoking jacket, or a fedora \u2014 is an exercise in an ever-evolving sense of style. There&amp;#039;s no irony or intention there \u2014 it&amp;#039;s just hair, man. And besides: Angie seems to like it. That&amp;#039;s the theory, anyway. It&amp;#039;s one thing for Brad Pitt to slip in and out of facial hair at any given moment \u2014 he&amp;#039;s Brad Pitt \u2014 but can the rest of us sample different strategies with impunity? I gave it a shot over the past six months, and I can report with absolute certainty that the answer is... maybe. Some background: I&amp;#039;m a beard man. Have been for years. In my younger days, my facial hair was a wild, untamed beast \u2014 the kind that led grown men to spontaneously give me a thumbs-up on the street. (Seriously.) More recently, I&amp;#039;ve tamed the forest in hopes of at least looking a little less unemployed and more respectable. (It&amp;#039;s true what they say about beards \u2014 if you have one, people give you an authority and a respect that you don&amp;#039;t necessarily deserve.) My beard had been with me through my wedding and two jobs. But then came the mustache. Or, to be more specific, the &amp;quot;mustache.&amp;quot; Last fall, I agreed to take part in a charity event/torture experiment called Movember. The idea was to grow a mustache and raise money to fight prostate cancer. It was a good and noble cause, of course, but it also gave me a chance to find out if I was somehow more than just a beard man. For my inaugural shave, I somehow managed to avoid cutting myself, no small achievement. When I was clean-shaven, people generally said I looked younger, which probably isn&amp;#039;t a bad thing, even if one colleague said I looked &amp;quot;fresh out of the womb.&amp;quot; (So much for that authority and respect thing.) And then I got to thinking about what kind of mustache I wanted. You have your garden-variety Tom Selleck. Your anything-but-garden-variety Dal\u00ED. You&amp;#039;ve got the one worn with a wink by anyone promising to make you a &amp;quot;Prohibition-era cocktail.&amp;quot; You&amp;#039;ve got the retro &amp;#039;stache (Pitt in Inglourious Basterds, the guy from The Artist), the hipster-artist &amp;#039;stache (Ryan Gosling off-duty), and the badass &amp;#039;stache (Ernest Hemingway in Midnight in Paris). Everything was on the table. Turns out I didn&amp;#039;t have to worry about any of that. While other men are able to grow soupcatchers worthy of Selleck and Reynolds, I looked like Frida Kahlo. The stubble above my lip was awkward. Fair. Invisible, but not quite invisible enough. I&amp;#039;ve been blessed with a somewhat Redfordian head of hair \u2014 emphasis on somewhat \u2014 so why the hell couldn&amp;#039;t I grow a Redfordian &amp;#039;stache? It was literally weeks before anyone outside my office acknowledged the thing. Eventually one guy in our building \u2014 not a coworker \u2014 gave me the coveted head nod, but as it turns out, he was a fellow Movemberian. (His mustache looked immaculate.) On another occasion, the wife and I had a few guests over to our apartment, including one of my best friends of more than 15 years. As the evening went on and drinks were drunk, I found myself astonished that he hadn&amp;#039;t noticed I&amp;#039;d shaved my beard. I finally brought it up myself, and he told me he was trying not to say anything. My mustache had become an uncomfortable topic, an elephant in the room, and mentioning it was like telling someone his fly was down. Come December, I shaved the damn thing off and started growing my beard again. I don&amp;#039;t mean to diminish the mustache. Far from it \u2014 I respect the &amp;#039;stache enough to know that I should stay away. (Seems like the mustache gene skips a generation.) And now I&amp;#039;m back to growing out my beard, not because I&amp;#039;m trying to send a message to the world (though the respect thing doesn&amp;#039;t hurt) but because I can. And if it gets wild and untamed again, so what? I can always shave it off and start again.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/style/a13540/facial-hair-for-men-2012/>