It’s December 1st, which means Movember is over and you can shave that unsightly growth off your face. In celebration of another year Movembered, we decided to comb the history of professional wrestling and list our choices for the 30 greatest soup-strainers in the sport’s history. This list was put together with education and science, so remember that while you may disagree (and voice your opinions in our comments section below) the list is objective and final. Objective. About which pro wrestlers had the best mustaches. No, seriously. Note: The definition of what a mustache is can vary, so here’s what we did. If the person had facial hair above their lip but not on their chin, we let it count. If they had a great ‘stache but too much chin hair, we disqualified them. That excluded a few notable mustaches, like Dutch Mantell/Zeb Colter. There may be instances of them going bare-chinned, but if it wasn’t common enough we made a judgment call. Each entry contains an explanation of why they ranked where they ranked, but for the sake of transparency we considered style, grooming, fullness, importance to character and time spent on the face. Some guys had great mustaches for a short portion of their career, and that may have bumped them down the list. So! Without further explanation, here are our choices for the 30 greatest mustaches in pro wrestling history. 30. Simon Gotch Danielle: I’m not gonna lie, Simon Gotch barely squeaked onto this list. There are innumerable independent wrestlers who are rocking some mean ‘staches, some that would rival or even surpass Gotch’s, but hey, if I didn’t feature someone from NXT Brandon would probably fire me. I love Gotch’s because it’s just … I mean, it’s A Mustache. It’s the kind of mustache you’d see drawn onto an Italian stereotype on the side of a pizza box, or even sported by the villain in a Victorian stage melodrama. As a girl with a known fondness for both mustaches and time-displaced wrestlers, I pretty much have to be all-in on someone whose persona hinges on being both an Olde Time Strongman and possible secret Time Lord. 29. CM Punk Danielle: Mustache CM Punk is a tricky one for me. As a Certified Mustache Enthusiast™, I wholeheartedly believe that most any wrestler can be improved with a sweet ‘stache. While I can’t say I’ve ever been a real fan of CM Punk (hold your boos I’m making a point), I was not against New Nexus CM Punk. Growing a mustache made him go from kind of a dickbag to full-on smarmy douchelord and I was into it. While it may not have been a great look realistically, there was something about the way it suddenly aged him about twenty years and added an instant sheen of greasy asshole that probably betrays more about my personal predilections than I would ever want it to.

Of course, the problem with looking like the biggest douchelord in the WWE is that he really did follow through with behaving like one during a tour of Australia. Welp, it was fun while it lasted, I guess. 28. B. Brian Blair Brandon: Don’t let The Iron Sheik know we put him on the list. B. Brian Blair had the ultimate 80s dad mustache, also known as the Chemistry Teacher Walter White. It’s barely even hair, it’s just a rectangle of brownish-red discoloration on the upper lip. The fact that Blair looked like a wrestling Bill Engvall made it even better. This mustache was the reason the Killer Bees gimmick existed. If you’ve never seen them, Blair and “Jumpin'” Jim Brunzell would escape under the ring when they got in trouble and emerge in a pair of matching masks. The referee wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, so they could cheat and switch places. It was a primitive, non-biological form of Twin Magic. I’ve always been sad that the payoff to this wasn’t the Bees losing the masks, and Blair having to roll under the ring and buzz off the mustache to keep the illusion alive. 27. Eddie Guerrero Brandon: The Guerrero family is full of good mustaches — Mando in particular — but Eddie Classic makes our list.

It was one of the most utilitarian mustaches of the 90s. When it had to, it made Eddie look like an insincere jerk. Then, with just a change of a facial expression, it could make him look like a well-meaning and kinda-square do-gooder. Also, you know, it was on Eddie Guerrero’s face. If Eddie Guerrero ever put on a glove, we’d include it in our VALENTINE’S DAY IS FOR GLOVERS: THE 30 BEST GLOVES IN WRESTLING HISTORY listicle. 26. Ray Rougeau Danielle: When Brandon and I were divvying up which mustached fellows we wanted to write about, I knew I had to get legendary Quebecois wrestler Ray Rougeau. I mean, besides (probably) being way more into him as a wrestler, there’s something about Ray Rougeau’s mustache I find oddly comforting. At first I thought it was maybe because it’s such a familiar Canadian stereotype from my childhood, but then I realized that at certain point, everyone has had an aunt or an uncle or a family friend who looks exactly like Rougeau, hair and all. When I look at him, I see virtually any number of dudes I would find if I went through my mom’s first wedding album from the Eighties, or – if we’re being totally candid – her second wedding album from the Nineties because, y’know…Canada. It’s so non-specific, and such a mundane, unspectacular mustache, but I can’t help but feel a warmth from the deepest part of my nostalgic heart whenever I see him.

25. Cody Rhodes Danielle: Mustache Cody Rhodes falls somewhere around the third-best iteration of Cody Rhodes for me. Brooding Facemask with Baggers heel Cody Rhodes feuding with Rey Mysterio and his souped-up knee brace will always be number one in my heart, and I love it enough for there to be a pretty big gap in between that and Dashing Cody Rhodes, the secret gem of 2010 WWE. After injuring himself in a feud Team Hell No (or Team Friendship as they should have been called), Cody returned to television in December 2012 with the kind of lip fringe only seen on bad GI Joe rip offs and b-movie posters. To say it was popular is an understatement. While yes, the mustache and friendship/tag partnership with Damien Sandow got more than its fair share of coded language taunts, Mustache Cody Rhodes got an abortive attempt at a romance with fellow mustache enthusiast Kaitlyn, a t-shirt, and maybe the greatest action figure WWE has ever produced.

The mustached was eventually shaved on the JBL and Cole show, but will live on in our hearts and vaguest of memories forever. 24. Big Scott Hall Danielle: While I may have never been nWo (once you’re not nWo you’re not nWo 4 life I guess), I am so into Razor Ramon and his fantastic theme song and him always being wet all the time always. Basically, if you put Rick Rude into a centrifugal machine and separated out two very key elements to his overall persona, you would get Razor Ramon and Big Scott Hall. AWA Scott Hall was still just a tiny baby wrestler being taken under Curt Hennig’s wing back then, despite looking older than the combined age of both authors of this article. The big hair, the dopey grin – there was an air of affability, and even a sense of naïveté that was almost completely eradicated by the debut of the Diamond Studd. There’s something about the cartoonish machismo of Big Scott Hall’s mustache that ranks extremely high on my personal list of mustaches, but unfortunately he has to fall pretty low on this one. 23. Triple H Danielle: My favourite thing about Triple H is that he’s basically played the same entitled asshole his entire career. From the blue-blooded snottiness of Hunter Hearst-Helmsley, through Evolution, DX, “end of an era” ‘H, all the way up to the bossy, dismissive COO we know and love (to watch stand beside the vastly superior to everyone Stephanie McMahon). While gimmick-wise this isn’t my favourite Triple H era, 2005 gave us glorious, Lemmy-loving, secret-metal-viking-lord Triple H. One Part Lemmy, one part Harley race, the ‘stache into the mutton chops is one of those styles that makes anyone look a little more grizzled, a little more, and way, way cooler than almost anyone around them. Brandon: Triple H has two role models: Harley Race and Lemmy from Motörhead. What do they have in common? Besides being f*cking awesome, the best versions of them have mustaches that connect to their sideburns. Unsurprisingly, H gave this look a try for a while. It’s most notable in his WrestleMania 22 entrance, a wonderfully choreographed piece of art ruined hilariously by a water bottle. H is more known for being clean shaven or having a full beard, so he loses a few points. He loses further points for not being Harley Race. 22. Farmer Burns Brandon: If you’re a wrestling fan, you should be into Farmer Burns. Oh, are you not into catch-as-catch-can wrestling from the 1800s and the American Heavyweight Championship, which was retired in the 1910s? Pfft, well, I’m into them.

Seriously though, Farmer Burns was a physical marvel and the real-life manifestation of all those “old timey strongman” characters you’re seeing today. His body was an athletic freakshow, so much so that he used to let people HANG HIM. Just straight-up hang him to death, and he’d withstand it with his neck girth and whistle ‘Yankee Doodle.’ If that guy didn’t have a mustache that could drown you in by-proxy masculinity I’d be ashamed of history. For added emphasis, he’d sometimes grow it out into the Scruffy from ‘Futurama’ look: Hyper-masculine 1800s American grappling is the new 1990s All Japan. 21. Hiroshi Hase Brandon: We don’t have a lot of puro stars on our list, but Hiroshi Hase is a must. He’s like Don Frye’s time-traveling Japanese son. If you aren’t familiar with Hase, get familiar. He’s one of the most under-appreciated Japanese wrestlers of the modern era. He spent almost a decade in New Japan before jumping to All Japan for another. He invented the Northern Lights Suplex. He was trained by Stu Hart, and learned under both Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki. He’s beaten the Road Warriors for the IWGP tag titles and Rick Rude for the WCW International World Heavyweight. If that resume doesn’t earn you the right to wear a classic, hard-assed mustache, what does? 20. The Road Warriors Brandon: The Road Warriors (or the “Legion of Doom” for the WWF kids) are a strange, wonderful case in wrestling history. They were ostensibly gay stereotypes; two large, excessively muscular guys with lots of facial hair, dressed in leather and spikes. They wouldn’t stop slapping each other on the pecs. Their manager was a weird intellectual with a rolled-up newspaper (or a puppet, depending on the era) who commanded them to do things. They might’ve been in a biker gang? Still, they’re one of the most beloved tag teams every, because the line between “tough stereotype” and “gay stereotype” is way thinner than you’d believe.

Animal alternated between a beard, mustache and goatee. Hawk would grow out his mustache from time to time, but stuck almost exclusively to the gym teacher special. Note: Road Warrior Hawk has the distinction of having the only mustache I’ve ever worn as a Halloween costume. I was Hawk when I was a kid, and painted on a big rectangle of brown under my nose. Basically everything involving the Road Warriors can be taken sexually, I think. 19. Paul Bearer Danielle: Aw, Paul Bearer still makes me sad. Sporting the same style since his days as Percy Pringle, the pencil mustache is one of those things that you just came to accept as always being around, kind of like Bearer himself. In his early days, he rocked one of this list’s few (and rare) blonde mustaches. His character changed from the blonde, gold-clad manager Percival Pringle III to the urn-wielding Father of Destruction: his face became ghostly pale, his clothes black and funereal, and his hair and mustache jet black. Both he and Sergeant Slaughter wore the same style, but their facial hair is so inextricably tied to their wildly different personas it’s very easy not to notice. Anyways, I just saw a picture of Mark Henry helping carry Bearer’s casket, so if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go be sad forever now. 18. Harley Race Brandon: If Triple H made the list for his Harley Race mustache tribute, Harley Race has to rank a little higher. If we’re doing an objective list of the coolest people to HAVE wrestling mustaches, Harley’s #1 with a bullet. The great thing about Race is that he never looked or seemed young. He had a mustache because he was OLD AS SHIT and that’s what old people had. His hair was a mess of curls, his sideburns grew into big, gross muttonchops and his mustache never really came in as fully as he’d like. Nobody cared. Nobody ever cared. Harley could’ve put on Groucho glasses and made them look tough. Just a gruff, threatening uncle you’ve never met showing up in a cheap suit, showing off his flashy belt buckle and threatening to snap you in half with his hands. Harley Race probably smelled like a pool of urine 24/7, and nobody ever made it seem cooler. 17. Red Bastien Danielle: For most, the mustache is the hallmark of those outdated notions of masculinity that pervades wrestling. You know, real manly man type stuff: drink some whiskey, smoke a cigar, grow a mustache, rub some dirt in it. While I don’t subscribe to the notion that these things are inherently male-driven pastimes, if there were ever a mustachioed wrestler who defined the social constructs of masculinity not named Magnum TA, it’s Red Bastien.

Bastien wrestled from around 1959-1971, and is described as having a “hot main event run in Florida” in the late Sixties. Despite his numerous titles and accomplishments, Bastien is one of those period wrestlers whose history relies mainly on oral retellings and hand-me-down legends. One such story involves Bastien trying to retain Nick Bockwinkel as his wingman. Bastien mailed ol’ Bock a detailed, anatomically correct drawing of his dick from multiple angles so as to help entice potential female suitors. I mean, really. If you’re super into the concept of masculinity as a theoretical status to be achieved, Red Bastien’s what you’re looking to aspire to. 16. The Great Gama Danielle: When I was initially drafting a list of mustaches and doodling hearts around Steakley Bakewell’s name, The Great Gama was one of the first mustached grapplers that came to mind. I geek out hard for Gama. We always look to Andre The Giant as our realest and truest tall tale come to life, but long before he was hoisting ladies onto his shoulders and drunkenly stealing horse drawn carriages, there was catch-as-catch-can wrestler The Great Gama. Gama was discovered at the age of 10 at a strongman competition in the Indian city of Jodhpur. When the field narrowed from 400 to 15, Gama was awarded the top prize due to his exemplary stamina and dedication in comparison to his older competitors. It’s said that his warm up contained to five thousand squats and three thousand pushups. His warm up! Gama also drank ten liters of milk a day. He wrestled all over the world, and remained undefeated throughout a career that spanned over fifty years. Gama was an inspiring figure to Bruce Lee, and heavily influenced his training style. Darun Mister from Street Fighter EX was based on him, and he also appeared in the Tiger Mask comics, and Shadow Hearts: Covenant video game. While mustaches have been popular in India and Pakistan for over a century, this massive handlebar mustache is more than fitting for a larger than life grappler Gama.

15. Rick Steiner Brandon: The Steiner Brothers devolved into ridiculous goatees in their later years, but early Rick Steiner should be celebrated for the roadkill-esque masterpiece on his face. Look at that thing. It looks like he’s holding an airplane neck pillow under his nose. There’s SO MUCH OF IT. Dude’s rocking a jet black toilet seat around his mouth.

I mean, they called him the “dog-faced gremlin,” which always seemed excessive. Are they saying he’s a gremlin, but gremlins are too ugly so he has the face of a dog, which isn’t classically “handsome” but also isn’t terrifying? Are they saying a dog’s face is WORSE than a gremlin’s, and Rick is combining the worst of two distinctly ugly things? I don’t know. I just wish he’d let the mustache grow out naturally until his entire face was covered in a horseshoe of black fur. 14. The Blackjacks Brandon: The ultimate in Old West Bad Guy mustaches. If you’re gonna be an evil cowboy team in black hats, you have to have comical, tar-black mustaches. It’s in the rulebook. These are guys who should be shooting John Marston and cackling over his dead body. I miss this aesthetic in wrestling. When I was younger, tough guy wrestlers felt like space aliens. They were these comic book tropes come to life, living and acting a way I’d never seen anybody act, punching people in the face and getting away with it. I’d see them bleeding to death in wrestling magazines and choking each other with chains and my brain went “I never, ever want to mess with a guy like that.” Do kids today have that same experience? Is there even one kid watching NXT who is afraid of Bull Dempsey, but too fascinated by his existence to turn away? Not on the list are the “New Blackjacks,” who look like they bought their entire lives at a Party City. 13. Dan Severn Brandon: The greatest mustache in MMA history belongs to this man. Seriously, try to imagine Dan Severn’s face without a mustache. It’s impossible. It’s like imagining Ronald McDonald as a regular dude. The problem is that the mustache is the closest thing Severn had to a personality. It was almost a crutch. It was like someone put a mustache on a barrel and rolled it down a hill. Don’t get me wrong, if the barrel touches you you’re dead, but it is what it is. 12. Sgt. Slaughter Danielle: While a number of the wrestlers on this list have only sported mustaches during parts of their careers, Sergeant Slaughter just wouldn’t be the same without his trademark pencil mustache. I mean, without it he’d pretty much just look like a big, miserable toe. There’s something really great about the way it follows his constant frown, like an extension of his disdain. The mustache may be thin, but considering it can hold its own on a face that’s at least 87% is a testament to why it’s ranked so high. 11. Big Bully Busick Danielle: Big Bully Busick made his way around the territories for a number of years before landing in the WWF in the early Nineties in a capacity referred to in polite circles as “enhancement talent.” Another time-displaced wrestler, Busick’s gimmick was that of a 1920’s bully. He would harass ring announcers, heckle audience members, even going so far as to pop a child’s balloon with his trademark cigar. While his look is attributed to varying time periods, it’s most clearly evocative of Ford Sterling’s cigar-smoking villain in the Keystone comedy Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life.

Keystone Studios played a key role in the silent film era, producing Keystone Cops,Sennetts Bathing Beauties, and helping some guy named Charlie Chaplin transition from the vaudeville stage onto film. Even if that Chaplin guy didn’t really do anything, Keystone pictures were instrumental in defining and popularizing slapstick comedy. Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life was the first appearance of the mustached villain tying the damsel in distress to railroad tracks. Previously, the railroad tracks trope was still popular (with origins going as far back as stage productions in the 1860s), but it was always by ne’er do well gangs as opposed to the mustache-twirling villain that first comes to mind. While Busick may have never tied someone to actual train tracks, he did have one of the most glorious mustaches featured on this list. It kept evolving, too, with the ends eventually making their way along his jaw bone to add a sideburn-less mutton chop. Yeah. I know. It’s amazing. While it really is quite admirable, it also proves what stiff competition he has if he’s barely edged out of the top ten. 10. Colonel DeBeers Danielle: Holy heck, this dude. Colonel DeBeers is fascinating to me. Every once in a while wrestling will present us with a squicky, moderately racist-yet-wholly uncomfortable to watch gimmick. That’s pretty much all this guy did. Colonel DeBeers, despite having zero accent whatsoever, was a pro-Apartheid, wealthy South African colonel whose name was directly derived from the diamond mining and trading corporation The DeBeers Group. In both the AWA and the UWF, he would refuse to wrestle opponents of colour, or even have his matches officiated by POC referees. We fuss about your Zeb Coulters and the whatnot, but the things this dude loved the most were literally just violent segregation and blood diamonds. While working in Pacific Northwest Wrestling, he played a heel named Mega Maharishi Imed, a play on the leader of the infamous Rajneeshpuram Commune in Oregon. While it may not ring a bell now for most people now, at the time it was the biggest open wound Oregon had going for it. The citizens of the commune had been embroiled in a bitter feud with locals that ended in a bioterrorist attack that ended up poisoning around 750 people. The gimmick also involved him growing out his facial hair and dressing in robes to seem more stereotypically Indian. Because of course it did. While he may not have topped the list for best mustache, he’s certainly got the number one most racist facial hair with a bullet. 9. Jesse Ventura Brandon: The only reason Jesse “The Body” ranks this low is because of how random his facial hair could be. You didn’t know if you were getting clean shaven, a mustache, a beard, a kaleidoscope covered in beads, whatever. Jesse’s probably the only person in the top ten who is the same with or without the ‘stache, and that says wonders for his personality.

My theory is that Ventura didn’t actually have a closet or own any clothes, he just had one of those Narnia portal wardrobes and jumped in before shows to Body Break whatever prancing fawn guy he saw and steal his gear. So sometimes he’d be wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and others he’d have Elton John sunglasses and a doily on his head. 8. Stan Hansen Brandon: 1. Jim Ross’ face though. 2. Remove the qualifiers from the Blackjacks entry and you have Stan “The Lariat” Hansen. This is the ultimate cowboy mustache. Simple, plain, stained from tobacco and basically existing to be a filtering system between his mouth and nose. Hansen’s got a mustache that doesn’t look like it grew, it was put there by divine forces. He has a mustache because he MUST. Stan Hansen was born with a f*cking mustache. A mustache, a cowbell attached to an unspecified length of rope and a mouth full of gross shit that made him look like he was throwing up diarrhea when he talked. He’s a miracle of a man, and the best living example of what a wrestling cowboy could — and should — be. Stan Hansen’s the greatest. Google “Stan Hansen promo” and watch literally any of them. They’re magic. The mustache keeps them focused so the words don’t come out of his eye sockets and blow up his head. 7. The Iron Sheik Danielle: Just as Sergeant Slaughter would be nothing without his mustache, imagining the Iron Sheik without his is near impossible. These days we all associate the Iron Sheik with his expletive-laden Twitter account and seriously uncomfortable hatred of Miley Cyrus, but his on-screen heel heat, Camel Clutch, and dastardly mustache-twirling promos are legendary. Being what my grandparents would colloquially refer to as “from away,” a familiar and gentlemanly mustache became a sinister part of his overall foreign persona. Oh, that Iron Sheik. You can’t trust him. He hurt Bob Backlund’s neck once and also loves Iraq and did you see that mustache? You can’t trust a foreigner with a mustache like that. 6. Mean Gene Okerlund Brandon: NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE! He might not’ve had the best signature mustache, but he had the one that validated everyone else’s. Gene Okerlund stood backstage at WWF and WCW events for the entirety of our wrestling lives, making “bald with a mustache” look simultaneously dorky and cool enough to be the next Bond look. Gene was just Gene, and his mustache was such an integral part of his facial chemistry it might as well have been his eyes. He proved that a mustache could be authoritarian without being pushy … smart and aware without being snarky or overbearing. He also may have grown the mustache to protect his upper lip from the receiver of a telephone, because 80% of his life was spent shilling 1-900-909-9900. Kids, get your parents’ permission. Did we ever figure out why he was “Mean?”

5. Ox Baker Brandon: Remember that thing I wrote about tough guys in wrestling magazines looking like scary, otherworldly creatures? Here’s Ox Baker, the king of them all. Ox was a horrifying looking person in iron-on t-shirts who had a move where he’d punch you in your chest and you’d DIE. FOR REAL, IN REAL LIFE. His mustache just kept going and going, and flowered out at the ends. He looked like someone’s regional interpretation of Satan, come to life in a low income area and obsessed with punching you to hell.

On a list of the most frightening mustaches in wrestling history, Ox is #1. The fact that we lost him this year is sad, but I don’t totally buy it. How can Ox Baker die? He’s not dead, he’s just in hiding somewhere down in Florida, and when I get too comfortable he’ll pop out from behind a palm tree and put his fist through my chest. 4. Magnum T.A. Brandon: The mustache that could’ve been. Magnum T.A. was my introduction to aggressively masculine mustaches. He was “Magnum” and had a mustache because of Magnum P.I., but I was dumb and didn’t put that together. I remember my mom getting really into Magnum and buying a program at a live event to get a pull-out poster, because southern ladies in the 80s were into that. Magnum’s mustache worked so well because he was the classic but modern southern gentleman. He wasn’t dressed like Colonel Parker or whatever, he’d just help out his friends and try to do the right thing. He’d win matches clean and decisively, all while kinda looking like Sam Elliott with a curly mullet. The mustache almost looked like it was shedding, and caused all his chest-growth. Like I said, 80s southern ladies were so into that. 3. Jake Roberts Brandon: Jake “The Snake” Roberts’ mustache represents everything wrong with having one. It makes you skeezy, greasy, untrustworthy. It turns your smile into something evil. It makes you the kind of guy who’d lure a dumb guy to a crypt and try to kill him with snakes. It makes you the kind of guy who’d knock someone unconscious and just put your non-venomous snake on them, even though it doesn’t do anything and they’re knocked out so they can’t even be scared. You’re THAT MUCH OF AN ASSHOLE. Jake’s mustache is hard to top. He didn’t have to curl it or dye it for emphasis … it was chaos, manifested in a strip of hair. You know you’re good at your job when even your grooming enhances the character you play. 2. Hulk Hogan Brandon: This is the most famous mustache in wrestling history, and one of the most famous in the world. Hulk Hogan’s fu manchu is iconic. It’s part of the image, along with the red and yellow, the leg drop, the prayers and training and vitamins. The hair of a Chinese man and the skin of a hot dog. It’s so unbelievably Hulk Hogan.