Have you noticed a significant uptick in the amount of facial hair lately? Not necessarily on you personally, but generally speaking and mostly on men. It seems pretty trendy these days for guys to have face-fuzz in all kinds of iterations. Moustaches, beards, goatees, unibrows – there’s a lot of growth going on when it comes to faces. I myself somehow stopped shaving for various reasons involving bets and unexplained inferior brain activity and am currently wearing an unfortunate facial mange-garden. I keep meaning to shave off the mouse-nest, but now I can’t. It’s Mo-vember!
As I mentioned in this space a couple of years ago, when I first heard of the month of “Movember” I just thought it was bad pronunciation or a typo, and it took me the first three weeks in November to figure out that Movember is a mashup of “moustache” and November. But Movember is about so much more than lip-rugs.
It all started in 2003 as a bit of a lark for two mates over adult beverages in Australia. At the time, they wondered why moustaches weren’t in fashion anymore, and set out to challenge their friends to grow lady-ticklers for the month of November. Thirty handlebar honchos signed up and Movember was born. The next year they decided to attach a fundraising component to the November flavor-saver challenge and they chose men’s health issues, and since then the worldwide Movember Foundation has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and generated a least a gazillion crumb-catchers. Most of the mouth-brow money has gone to fight prostate diseases, which for a long while I thought was called “prostrate” (with an “r”) but that refers to the position that a guy ends up in when his prostate acts up.
But having facial hair can be a challenge in itself. I’ve found that a moustache can cause spontaneous unrelenting sneezing, whereupon stray moustache hairs tickle one’s nostrils at the most inopportune times. Also, eating is messier that you would imagine, but on the up side you always have left-overs readily available hours later with just a lick or two.
And trimming is tricky. Those electric trimmers can swath half a stache with one slip of the wrist. And then there’s prickly face, which can be pretty painful. Half the time it feels like a porcupine has embedded itself in your mug, and most of the time you indeed look like you have a porcupine stuck to your face.
But it’s not only men for whom Movember is meaningful and memorable. Moustaches are not generally appreciated on females (although we’ve all known a few haven’t we?) but women can certainly participate in the fund raising aspect. Since the word “Move” is conveniently embedded in “Movember”, instead of growing some upper lip-holstery, the female gender of species can raise moola by registering a physical activity for each day. “30 moves for Movember!”
So even if you are like me and couldn’t grow a decent snot-mop if my prostate depended on it, let’s support those who can create an impressive grass-grin for Movember and donate to an important worthy cause that has affected the lives of so many unfortunate dudes.
So even if I’m not too crazy about November as a cold and meaningless month, I really like Mo-vember. It makes me think of three of my very good friends, all of whom have soup-strainers. But neither of them have a prostate anymore. They are both better now, thank goodness, and if Movember had anything to do with that, I say bring on the face-fungus!