In a 2010 poll, Salvador Dalí's facial hair was voted the most famous moustache of all time. The flamboyant moustache was part of his schtick, there's no denying that. But some have assigned a deeper meaning to it. The Wikepedia entry for Dalí attributed the facial hair to 17th-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez (see image). And yet perhaps the influence was more literary than painterly. Appearing on the game show The Name's the Same in January, 1954, Dalí was asked (at the 4:00 mark) whether the stache was a joke. To which the Spanish painter responded, "It's the most serious part of my personality. It's a very simple Hungarian moustache. Mr. Marcel Proust used the same kind of pomade for this moustache." And there you have it, the artistic influence of the world's most famous facial hair.

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