Face Value

It’s that time of year when fidgety men embarrassingly scratch their stubble covered faces and nervously check window reflections to see how they look. No it’s not the run up to some macho stubble beauty pageant, it’s Movember.

For those of you who have had their heads buried in the sand for the last eight or nine years or so, Movember is a movement set up to increase awareness of men’s health through the sponsored growth of a moustache. The principle being that every ‘Mo Bro’ becoming a 30 day walking talking billboard. The funds raised are channelled into not only the general raising of men’s awareness of their own health issues but more specifically supporting the treatment of prostate and testicular cancers.

Last year alone the Mo Bro’s and Mo Sistas, (these being the long suffering scratched faced female supporters of their hairy faced men), raised £79.3M, Twenty two million of this in the UK alone. A staggering number and a huge advance from its humble beginnings in a Melbourne pub to what is now a truly global phenomenon.

Watching friends and colleagues carefully groom their face fungus with varying degrees of success it’s become evermore obvious that while this is all being undertaken with the best of intentions that one or two individuals are using it as an opportunity to experiment with the cultivation of a top lip warmer that would otherwise earn them ridicule and much gnashing of teeth within the confines of the family home. Lets face it we’ve all wondered what we would look like with a ‘tache. This safety in numbers has also had a couple of interesting side effects. Strangers, that is to say Mo Bro strangers, are approaching each other and entering into conversation. Purely based around the hair sprouting from under their nose. Men just don’t normally do that.

Why is this such a good and worthy cause? Well us men are apparently very poor at reading our own bodies. We will leave it and leave it and leave it and then finally when we seek advice it’s too late. When you consider that the occurrence of prostate cancer in men is the same as breast cancer in women you begin to understand the seriousness of the situation and as in all things medical the sooner the diagnosis the better the chance of survival. One in nine men in the UK will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at a rate of one every fifteen minutes. That’s seriously scary stuff. More than 10,000 men will die from the disease in the UK this year and don’t be fooled into thinking that this is an old mans problem. Almost half of all testicular cancer cases occur in men under the age of 35 and 90% in men under 55.

Now I mentioned a couple of interesting side issues to the important message and fund raising centred around Movember, the first being the camaraderie and impromptu conversations popping up between fellow ‘tache toting men folk but have left the second, a cautionary tale of style to the very last. It would appear that the shape of moustache you cultivate may well have you being categorised as a certain type of person. It seems we can’t help but try and pigeon hole everything and everyone. We’re all aware of the growths sported by undesirable historical characters the likes of Hitler and Stalin but perhaps are less aware of some of the more contemporary styles and their social connotations.

There’s the chevron, the Dali, the pencil, the Fu-Manchu, the imperial, the Mexican, the natural, the English, the handlebar, the list and styles goes on and on but each has a very defined look and subsequently social standing. Needless to say if you wear a team colours or badge you are graphically displaying who you are and where your allegiance lies and it would appear a moustache is just such a badge. One of my colleagues has found this to be true. He is sporting a very particular style of facial growth and has been propositioned twice in a week, once on the underground and once in an hotel where the guy even offered him his room keys. Very gratifying but not his style. It does however give a whole new meaning to the term face value.