So Many Ways to Say Mustache

There are several things happening right now in my corner of the world. First, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is upon us and though I am not participating this year, I know lots of writers who are. I am cheering from the sidelines. Go! Go! Go! Also, despite my non-participation, I, too, find myself eyeballs deep in a novel project, working on the other end of the process toward the final draft. I’m currently on the cusp of getting the manuscript into the hands of several excellent beta readers and daily vacillating between the belief that this is shaping into a great read and the certainty that I am a no-talent hack. So, I’m right on schedule.

Good luck to all the NaNoWriMos! Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

Also going down is the annual premature Christmasification of the Thanksgiving season. I don’t think it’s actually any worse this year than it has been for the last several, but maybe it is. With inflation making life a little more difficult for folks these days, perhaps the retailers are pushing a little harder into their best money making time of the year. I pretend to mind, but I must not as I have begun to consider some possible gift ideas.

Perhaps because it is also No Shave November, my gift-giving ponderings have been drawn toward Englishman Harvey Adams, who joined his family’s pottery business in 1861 and changed the world of fashion forever. Or at least for several decades, because what Adams did was cleverly solve a problem that was plaguing parlors throughout the British Empire where fashionable gentlemen found themselves melting into their teacups. 

Driving the ladies wild. Image by geri cleveland from Pixabay

The height of gentlemanly fashion was, of course the mustache (or moustache, if you happen to be a British gentleman), required as part of the British military uniform, and preferred, evidently, by the ladies. But it wasn’t that simple, because if you were going to wear a lip sweater, you also had to engage in some fancy grooming practices and you needed to have a few tools handy, like comb, scissors, dyes, and enough wax to give your facial hair that natural look and feel of molded plastic.

The problem with all of that excessive grooming became apparent at tea time, when the steam rising from a dainty cuppa could turn a carefully coiffed cookie duster into a messy, melting glob of goo. Then comes along Harvey Adams, genius inventor of the mustache cup with a small guard inside to protect a man’s sculpted masterpiece of a lip doily from the hot liquid inside the cup. And the trendiest gift of the holiday season was born.

By 1885, mustache cups were everywhere—widely manufactured and in use throughout the British Empire as well as the United States—and Adams had grown wealthy enough to retire from the pottery business. 

Richard Huber, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The mustache and its accompanying teacup enjoyed popularity until World War I when grooming a glorious stache became more difficult in the trenches and a well fitted gas mask seemed more important anyway.

Lip foliage has made a comeback, though, as is evidenced both by how easy it is to find a lengthy list of mustache slang on the internet and by how many products have surfaced this almost-holiday shopping season designed for men and their mouth brows.

Despite how it may sound, I tend to like nicely trimmed facial hair, though I definitely don’t share the Victorian and Edwardian obsession with waxed, sculpted, and dyed snot catchers. Still, I do have at least one mustachioed loved one on my shopping list this season. After No Shave November is over, maybe you will, too. Thanks to the genius of Harvey Adams, I think I may have an idea.