Willi Chevalier
Sigmaringen, Germany
Sigmaringen Beard Club
Partial beard freestyle category (“Willi has won this category at all WBMC’s in memory with the exception of the 2003 WBMC when he was on injured reserve following an unfortunate encounter with a power drill”)
The mustache is a widely debated form of facial hair that I, for one, was never a fan of until just recently when I discovered this: the World Beard and Mustache Championships . Only eighteen years old, this amazing phenomenon brings together hirsute competitors to rival one another in a range of categories (six specifically for mustaches: natural, Hungarian, Dalí, English, imperial, and freestyle).

Elmar Weisser
Brigachtal, Germany
Swabian Beard Club
(Beard depicts Berlin’s Brandenberg Gate)
After being held in Sweden, England, Germany, Norway, and other locations, this coming year’s championship games will be hosted in Anchorage, Alaska. Beard Team USA is sadly less impressive than many other teams, but according to the World website, in 2007 “Upstart Beard Team USA mounted a serious challenge to the always dominant Germans, taking first in five categories.”

Burke Kenny
Olympia, Washington
Beard Team USA
(Kenny is “a former pizza delivery professional”)
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The Dalí category makes a great deal of sense if you’re familiar with pictures of the painter, one of which is below. Dalí not only dedicated paintings to his stache, he also created a book of his mustache with photographer Philippe Halsman.

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All of this made me curious about Guinness Book World Records, so I discovered Badamsinh Juwansinh Gurjar–the man designated in 2004 as winner of the world’s longest mustache. At that time his mustache was twelve and a half feet and he had not cut it for twenty-two years. Gurjar is pictured below.