You’ve finally got that gentleman mustache you’ve been seeking for ages. Your mustache-having friends finally welcome you to the club, and things are looking good.
The days go on, and you notice how annoying it is to eat with that large thick mustache. The food keeps getting stuck in it, and cleaning it gets more tedious.
So what’s the deal? Should you shave it off again and go back to how you were eating before? Or should you adapt? Is there even a way to adapt? How to eat with a mustache?
Eating with a mustache requires some modification to your table manners. You’ll need to adjust how you place the food in your mouth, the amount of food you eat per bite, and your eating speed. You should also have some paper towels ready should accidents happen.
This short paragraph somewhat answers but if you really want to make your eating easier with a mustache, then stick around for the details.
1. Eat With an Angle
Most people eat by simply bringing the spoon or the food directly to their mouths. Then, they just bite on the food or the spoon, and that’s pretty much it.
For a gentleman with a mustache, especially if the mustache is large enough to cover the mouth, this is a recipe for disaster.
If you attempt to eat your food normally, as if you don’t have a mustache, your mustache hair will get trapped between your food and your upper lip. This is because you’re essentially dipping your mustache in whatever you’re eating.
This is even more frustrating if you like to connect your mustache to your beard.
It might seem funny to other people, but mustache owners know how much of a nightmare that is. Not only will you struggle to clean your mustache, but you’ll also have to do it after every bite, which gets frustrating over time.
Eating with an angle is one trick to avoid or reduce this issue from happening.
When you bring up food to your mouth, tilt your head back slightly. Don’t bring the food directly to your mouth. Instead, approach from a downward angle to try and reduce contact with your mustache as much as possible.
Tiling your head backward and bringing food with a downward angle is like your number one rule while eating with a mustache. It can be a pain initially, but you’ll get used to it with time.
2. Get Your Facial Hair Ready to Eat
Before enjoying that delicious meal, use your clean hands to get those loose hair away from your lips as much as possible.
Gently push away your mustache hair from your lips and ensure that no individual strands are hanging around.
Do the same for your beard hair and your lower lips. This clears the facial hair obstructions around your mouth to some extent. This could go a long way with the other tips on our list.
3. Wrap Your Beard
If your beard is large enough to interfere with the “eating with an angle” technique, you’ll be stuck between trying not to touch your mustache or your beard with food.
Wrap your beard using a beard wrap or tie it with a tie. This will give you a lot more room to approach your mouth from that much-needed downside angle.
If you don’t have any way to wrap your beard or get it out of the way, you could tuck it inside your collar as a last resort. It’s not the ideal situation, but it will save your beard and mustache from turning into a food crumb pool.
4. Open Your Mouth a Little Bigger
For those of you fine gentlemen with mustaches large enough to cover most or all of your mouths, you’ll have to compensate for that.
Tilting your head backward and eating at an angle may not be enough if your mustache is too large. You’ll need a larger than average mouth opening to keep your mustache away from the food as much as possible.
Don’t worry about looking strange. Your mustache will cover most of your mouth anyway, and to surrounding people, you’ll look like you’re opening your mouth usually.
Keep in mind that we said open a “little” bigger. Don’t fully open your mouth because it will look off even if your mustache covers some of it.
You are your own gauge when it comes to how big you should open. Practice eating in front of a mirror to find that sweet spot between opening enough and looking normal.
5. Take It Slow
No matter how you try to change it, you simply can’t eat at normal speed if you have a mustache.
Eating slowly and carefully is the key to keeping your mustache food-free. Accidents will occasionally happen, but you can significantly reduce their instances by taking your time eating.
You’ve already spent months growing that mustache and trimming it to perfection. It only makes sense that you be gentle with it as you eat.
6. Cut Food Into Smaller Portions
The bread and butter of keeping your mustache clean while eating is cutting food into smaller bites. This should be like your golden rule, and even your beard will thank you for it.
The days of tackling that juicy burger head-on are over. You’re a member of the beard gang now, and keeping your facial hair neat should be your top priority.
Whether you’re in public or at home, develop the habit of cutting your food into small pieces enough to fit into that opening you practiced in front of the mirror.
This will extend your mealtime by a few minutes, and we won’t deny that. However, it will save you the time and hassle of having to clean your beard and mustache.
You may give yourself a break by eating any way you like when you’re at home. One does crave taking direct bites of food sometimes. You should take your time afterward to clean your mustache thoroughly.
That being said, we still don’t recommend doing that. You may get used to the habit of clearing food crumbs out of your mustache and beard. The smell, on the other hand, is something that could linger around a lot longer.
Trust us; you don’t want your hard-earned mustache and beard to end up smelling like your dinner.
7. Use Smaller Utensils
This might be a small piece of information, but you’d be surprised how easier it would be to maintain a clean mustache if you ditch larger utensils.
We’re not talking about plates and similar utensils; we’re talking about spoons, forks, or any utensil that carries the food into your mouth.
Using smaller utensils means having smaller amounts of food going to your mouth and less risk of rinsing your beard in it. You’ll also open your mouth less and have much better control over what comes into your mouth.
8. Don’t Fill Up Your Spoons
We know the temptation of wanting to have a mouthful of that tasty food. We also know how much effort you exerted to get that mustache up and going.
Keep your spoons half-filled before they go into your mouth. While eating, your hands may shake, someone might hit your arm, or anything could happen to move that spoon in a wrong moment.
Having a half-full spoon gives you a lot of room to compensate if the food decides to jump out of your spoon for whatever reason.
This is especially helpful when consuming liquid foods like chowder and soup, for example. If these fall on your beard, they may accumulate bacteria, irritate the skin, and cause a rash. Having a rash under your beard is a hassle you don’t want to deal with often.
Remember, no matter how good that food is, you’ll end up consuming it in minutes. It’s not worth ruining months of mustache-growing effort for it.
9. Mind the Liquid Foods
Approaching your large mustache with a spoon of liquid food is a risk for every mustache owner. The way that soup runs on the spoon back and forth as it pleases poses a risk of soaking your mustache at any time.
Liquid foods are harder to clean, and their smell will linger much longer if they come in contact with your mustache.
When a man with no mustache eats soup, he would place the spoon in his mouth and close his lips, then grab out the spoon. As a man with a mustache, doing that will soak your mustache in your soup.
Avoiding this can be really simple, but you’ll need some time to get used to it. When you place the spoon in your mouth, rotate it 180 degrees to spill the soup into your mouth.
Then, and only then, you should close your lips on the spoon and pull it out in a downward motion.
10. Use The Nimble Fingers
This may not be good-looking while eating in public, so we recommend doing it while in the comfort of your home.
Using your fingers to hold those small pieces and placing them in your mouth is more helpful than you think. You’d be surprised about the difference in control you get between eating food with utensils and with your fingers.
If you use your fingers, you get that “right” sensation as you place the food in your mouth. The index finger will push your mustache away from the upper lip while the thumb helps you gauge your opening.
Not all foods and situations are suitable for eating with fingers. Nevertheless, it’s a helpful tip that can save you a lot of hassle whenever you can actually apply it.
11. Napkins and Paper Towels
We didn’t want to put this at the beginning of our list since it may seem obvious or even annoying to some people.
However, it’s hard to omit the importance of napkins and paper towels. If you’re a man with a full mustache and beard, napkins and paper towels should be there for every meal.
This might seem like an exaggeration to some people, but if you can’t find napkins or paper towels before a bothersome meal, don’t eat that meal. You’ll spend a long time trying to clean your mustache afterward if you do.
Additionally, wiping your mustache should be done after every single bite you take. Practice eating in front of the mirror. You’ll get some sense of the areas of your mustache that catch the most food.
Keep in mind that no matter how careful you are to prevent food from touching your mustache, it could still happen. It’s not about if it happens; it’s about when it happens, and that’s when paper towels come to play.
You won’t feel it if your mustache catches some food, and you don’t have to visibly see food on your mustache to clean it. Train yourself to wipe quickly and efficiently after every bite. There might be food remnants on your mustache that are too small to see, so just wipe every time.
12. Use Mustache Wax
Mustache wax or its alternatives are a great idea to help yourself eat with a little less mess on your mustache.
Whether it’s on your beard or mustache, using the appropriate wax will straighten the hair strands and prevent them from getting loose.
This is especially helpful in preventing those loose mustache hairs from getting stuck in your mouth.
When a mustache hair strand is waxed, it has a much less tendency to move around. Your mustache will effectively act as one “predictable” unit. That predictable unit stays in place and is less likely to send down some loose hairs to dip in your food.
You can also wax your beard to keep it from getting in the way as much as you can. Don’t be afraid to use beard wax every day. It’s safe and won’t harm your beard.
13. The Triangle Is Your Friend
Toast bread or any similar foods should be cut down into a triangular shape. That triangle in bread products will be your dear friend for as long as you have a thick mustache.
When you bite into that triangle, go to one of the edges. Then keep alternating between every edge you have until you have a small piece that you can fit in your mouth without being obstructed by your mustache.
Forming that triangle doesn’t have to be always done with cutting. You could simply fold your toast or pizza into a triangle shape and, again, go for the edges.
14. Bite With Your Teeth, Not With Your Lips
With the exception of liquid foods, you should train yourself to bite with your teeth as much as possible. Hear us out.
Anyone will bite food with their teeth anyway. The thing is, we subconsciously close our lips right after we bite with our teeth. As a gentleman with a mustache, that’s what you should train yourself not to do.
Closing your lips right after you bite into the food will, again, lead to trapping your mustache. Instead, tightly bite on the food with your teeth, then use your tongue to pull the food into your mouth.
Only when you’re absolutely sure that your food is safe and secure in your mouth should you bring your lips together to chew.
15. Be Smart With the Sauces
If you’re a sauce lover, you need to be extra careful with your mustache. Let’s say that you want to enjoy a big tasty hot dog.
The amount of ketchup and other sauces on sandwiches like hotdogs could be a nightmare for mustache havers. Luckily, there’s an easy fix for that.
While preparing your sandwiches, place your sauces before you place your hotdogs. That way, the sauces will be trapped underneath the hotdog and won’t splatter that much on your mustache.
16. Always Have a Comb
So, you’re enjoying that tasty but messy meal. Your hands and fingers are fully invested; you’re being as careful and focused as possible not to get anything on your mustache.
Everything is going great, but as you have some final bites, a funny friend moves your hand, and the food goes straight to your mustache.
Your hands are greasy, and so are everyone else’s. The food is starting to sink into your mustache, and the paper towel would only push it even deeper. What should you do? Comb it out immediately.
It doesn’t matter if you get the comb itself a little dirty; you can always clean it later without problems. The main concern at that moment is to comb out the food as fast as possible. The more it lingers around, the harder it will be to take out, and it may stain your mustache and leave a smell.
Walking around with a comb shouldn’t be an abnormal thing for men who live by the beard and mustache lifestyle. When you sit down at the meal table, take out that comb and have it ready to save your mustache whenever needed.
Final Conclusion
You’ve made it till the end. Well done. It shows your dedication to keeping your hard-earned mustache and your willingness to adapt your eating lifestyle around that!
Remember, eat slowly, carefully, and use smaller portions and utensils. Avoid biting into sandwiches as much as you can, and always keep paper towels and combs for emergencies.
If you want to furtherly take care of your mustache using oils, check out this article.
