Facial hair fun: Bacon shaving cream, mustache bottle openers

As the facial-hair-focused month of Movember draws to a close, we thought we’d revisit some of the beard- and mustache-themed merchandise that’s come to our attention, including bacon-scented shaving cream, a stainless steel, mustache-shaped bottle opener and a book cataloging the cultural history of the ‘stache.

The most recent to cross our desk is J&D;’s Foods’ Bacon Shaving Cream, touted as “the highest quality meat-scented shaving cream on the market today.”

Justin Esch, a co-founder and “bacontrepreneur” at Seattle-based J&D;’s (the company, which launched in 2007, is responsible for a slew of bacon-flavored products such as Baconnaise and a bacon-flavored popcorn called BaconPOP) told All the Rage that their latest product does not contain any actual pork products.

“We wanted that,” he said in a recent phone interview, “but we ran into shelf-life issues and things like that. Our goal was to make a real, high-quality shaving cream -- something classy.”

To that end, Esch says, the company worked with the Art of Shaving, the Gillette-owned brand that’s carved out a niche in the high-end men’s grooming market, to develop the product, which is available in a limited run of 2,500 jars as of Nov. 28. J&D;’s Foods Bacon Shaving Cream, 5-ounce jar ($14.99), available online at www.baconshavingcream.com.

During a recent trip to Las Vegas for the 2012 National Beard and Moustache Championships, we ran across what may be the perfect stocking stuffer for the facial-hair aficianado/beer drinker in your life: a mustache-shaped bottle opener.

A single, laser-cut piece of stainless-steel gives the Mustache Bottle Opener a simple, sturdy and reliable feel that’s sorely lacking in these high-tech, ever-more-complicated days.

Created barely a year ago, it’s the brainchild of Adam Bierton, a Rochester, New York, metalwork artist who’d been asked to create a mustache-themed beer tap for a local pub. It was while working on that project that Bierton realized the curved end of the mustache shape he’d created could easily pop the top off a frosty-cold one.

The nearly $20 price tag might seem hefty for a bottle opener at first blush, but we prefer to think of it as investing in a portable, functional, made-in-America, trendy piece of pocket art that’ll last a lifetime of six-pack-popping. Mustache Bottle opener ($19.99), keychain ($20.99) and necklace ($27.99), available online at mustachebottleopener.com.

One of the judges at this year’s battle of the bearded in Las Vegas was Allan Peterkin, a Toronto-based psychiatrist who has written and commented extensively on the topic of facial hair, and whose latest book, “One Thousand Mustaches: A Cultural History of the Mo,” was published in September.

The paperback book is part illustrated facial-hair field guide, which is helpful if one finds themselves agonizing, for example, about whether the English mustache they’re looking at is a peculiar sub-species (that style alone has nine) and part historical survey of famous lip spinach.

It also turns out to be a surprisingly rich treasure trove of tonsorial trivia. We had no idea, for example, that “the mustache is capable of absorbing twenty percent of its own weight in liquid,” or that “[u]ntil the 1940s a man had plural ‘mustaches.’ Now he has but one ‘mustache.’”

Now that’s our kind of splitting hairs.

“One Thousand Mustaches: A Cultural History of the Mo,” 160 pp., $12.95 (Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, Canada)

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