Mustaches may be making a comeback, but women remain ambivalent about the look.
In recent years the mustache, and facial hair in general, appears to have made a comeback. After the clean-shaven 90s and early 2000s, many men are now growing out their facial hair. November in particular has become a time for men to let their whiskers grow freely. Dubbed ‘Movember’, this month has become home for a campaign where men to grow mustaches in order to raise money for charities and increase awareness of men’s health issues.
The latest research from YouGov shows that Americans tend to have positive impressions of mustaches, with 31% liking them and 16% disliking them. 48% say that they neither like nor dislike mustaches. There is a notable gender divide, however, as men are much more in favour of mustaches than women are. 39% of men like mustaches compared to 25% of women, 21% of whom dislike mustaches. Only 12% of men have negative impressions of sporting hair on your upper lip.
One of the main motivations for Movember was to encourage men to be more open about health issues, particularly issues that only affect men such as prostate or testicular cancer.
However, when men are asked whether they discuss health problems with friends or family, men are actually marginally less likely than women are to keep these things to themselves. Half of men say that they discuss problems with family and friends while 43% say that they are private. Women are evenly split however, with 47% tending to keep problems to themselves and 46% saying that they discuss medical issues.
When asked whether they knew about Movember, most Americans (78%) had never heard of the event, with only 14% of Americans saying that they had heard of it. However, younger Americans (aged 18-29) are twice as likely as the general population to know about Movember, with three in 10 (30%) aware of the campaign.
The Movember campaign first began in Australia in 2003 but has since spread all over the world. In the United States the campaign has strong ties to the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
Full poll results can be found here.
Image: Google.
