Dodge the dodgy face caterpillars

When I was little I thought my friend’s dad was a jewellery thief, simply because he had a neat, shiny moustache.

Nice as he was, even at the age of five I knew there was something dodgy about moustaches. And now moustaches are apparently back in fashion. Internet searches for moustache-growing tips have increased by 63% since March, while for moustache oil it’s nudging 68%.

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Enter the lockdown ’tache, lately championed by Harry Styles, presumably grown while home alone because when was there a better chance to experiment with face-scaping.

To be clear, I’m talking here exclusively about moustaches without beards – that lonely nostril caterpillar, crawling off the lip of the nearest dictator and onto the face of the men we love.

And the women of the world go: “Oh. Oh dear.”

Because we still aren’t convinced by moustaches. We weren’t when Hitler had one, or Franco, or Saddam Hussein, or Trujillo, or Stalin, or Syria’s llama-like Bashar al-Assad, or Vlad the Impaler for that matter.

Megalomaniacs love a moustache, which is in itself telling: it suggests a dangerous, fragile vanity, for its perfect upkeep demands daily curatorship and beard-shaving, a self-obsession the likes of which a beard-moustache combo does not require.

We were amused by Salvador Dali’s; we weren’t totally convinced when Tom Selleck had one, nor Burt Reynolds; we were conflicted by the youth-golden Brad Pitt’s lip-shadow in Thelma and Louise, and later his proper one, because we were getting mixed messages: the moustache was universal code for shifty.

I think, possibly controversially, that some black men can manage a moustache with panache – not all, but some.

No, I don’t mean Robert Mugabe’s toothbrush stripe. I’m thinking Will Smith, Idris Elba, and obviously Martin Luther King.

Maybe because black men are not forever yoked to the image of the dodgy salesman: white, portly, in a sweat-yellowed shortsleeved shirt – and a moustache.

I’m not sure it’s the lip-hair, so much as the association: used car dealers and dictators.

Call us shallow, men, but please spurn stand-alone moustaches.

In return, we promise not to grow ours.

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