How to Grow a Moustache Past the Awkward Bit

How to grow a moustache, in one line: stop shaving your top lip, leave the length completely alone for four weeks, and trim nothing except the hairs that cross into your mouth. The hair is rarely the problem. What makes a half-grown moustache look wrong is a thin, uneven strip sitting alone on an otherwise smooth face, and you can avoid most of that by growing the rest of your face with it and taking the beard off later.

Why a half-grown moustache looks wrong

Nobody's top lip fills in evenly. The middle, under the nose, usually comes through first, and the corners are last. So at two weeks you do not have a small moustache, you have a narrow smudge that stops well short of the mouth. Put that on a freshly shaved face and the eye goes straight to it, because nothing around it says it was meant.

That is the look men are trying to avoid when they ask how to grow one without it looking creepy. Three things cause it, and the hair is only one of them:

• Contrast. Sparse hair next to clean skin reads thinner than it is.
• Width. A moustache that stops halfway to the corners of the mouth looks accidental. One that reaches the corners looks chosen, even when it is thin.
• Edges. Stray hairs drifting onto the lip or out towards the cheeks say neglect, not style.

You cannot hurry the hair. You can deal with all three of the others.

How to grow a moustache: two routes

Route	What you do	How long it looks odd	Works best for
Beard first	Grow everything for three to four weeks, then shave the beard off and keep the moustache	Hardly at all, it just looks like stubble	Anyone who can get away with stubble at work
Top lip only	Shave the cheeks, chin and neck as normal from day one	About three weeks	Men who have to be clean shaven apart from the lip

The beard-first route is the one we would pick for almost anyone growing a moustache for the first time. Stubble frames the top lip while it is thin, and when you take the rest off at week three or four, the moustache arrives already at full width. It skips the stage everybody hates.

It is not allowed in November, by the way. Movember starts everyone from bare skin on the 1st, so if that is why you are growing it, follow the thirty-day Movember plan instead, which is built around that rule.

When the day comes, the beard can come off here as a Clean Shave, £11 and twenty minutes, razor and hot towels included. Tell whoever is holding the razor the moustache stays, and show him where you want the corners to finish before he starts. A razor is the one tool in the shop that cannot put a corner back.

The lip line is the only thing you trim

Everything else waits until week four. The lip line does not, because hair crossing onto your lip ends up in your mouth, your coffee and the head of your pint, and that alone makes most men give up.

1. Wash it and let it dry, since wet hair hangs longer and you will cut too much.
2. Comb it straight down from the centre.
3. Keep your mouth relaxed and closed. Do not smile and do not stretch your top lip down, both of which pull the skin and leave the line too high once it settles.
4. With small, sharp scissors, snip just the hairs that reach past the edge of the lip, two or three at a time.
5. Leave the corners alone.

That last step matters more than it looks. Where the corners stop decides between a chevron, which finishes at the corners of the mouth, and a horseshoe, which carries on down towards the jaw. Cut into them at week two and you have made the choice before you could see the options. The shapes themselves are laid out in our guide to moustache styles.

Train it which way to lie

A moustache does not grow straight down. Top lip hair tends to fan out to each side from under the nose, and some moustaches have one side that wants to cross over the lip at an angle, or a small whorl near a corner. You can steer it while it is soft and short, which is far easier than fighting it at eight weeks.

Comb it down and slightly out from the centre every morning, once it is long enough to hold a comb. After a shower, a minute of a hairdryer on low with the comb going the same way sets it for the day. From about week three, a small dab of moustache wax or beard balm on a fingertip keeps it there. Wax is for holding direction at this stage, not for curling ends. A rice-grain amount is plenty, and more than that just looks wet.

Fair, red and grey moustaches

Lighter hair is not necessarily growing any slower. It shows later, because there is less contrast with your skin. A fair moustache at three weeks can look like nothing in a bathroom mirror and perfectly respectable in daylight, and in photos it often disappears entirely.

So judge it by a window, not under the bathroom bulb, and give it the full four weeks before you decide it is not working. Fair hair is also where the beard-first route earns its keep, because the stubble around it does the job the colour cannot. A moustache that comes through redder or lighter than your hair is common and nothing to worry about.

Nothing on a shelf makes it grow faster. Oils, supplements and serums sold on a growth claim get the same answer we gave in the patchy beard guide: fine for the skin, no use for coverage, and anything medical belongs with your GP, not your barber.

Week four, and the decision you are making

At about four weeks there is enough length to see what your top lip will actually do. Look at three things: whether it reaches the corners of your mouth, whether the two sides match in thickness, and whether there is a gap in the middle under the nose.

If it reaches the corners and the sides match, it will carry a chevron and you can start shaping. If the corners are still thin, give it another four weeks before going for anything wide, or settle on a pencil, which follows the lip and suits lighter growth. A gap under the nose often closes with length rather than time, because longer hair from either side falls across it.

That is also the right week for a first proper trim, and it is ten minutes in the chair at £5. Tell us the shape you are growing towards, not just "tidy it up", and we will set the edges for that shape and leave the length you have spent a month on. Book it for when you are at four weeks, not three, because a week early is how the corners go.