Facial Hair Special Fair

There were men with Fu Manchu moustaches. There were contestants with
long flowing Gandalf beards. And there was the reigning world champion:
German Karl-Heinz Hille, whose gravity-defying sideburns look a bit like
an upturned bucket.

Some 220 contestants from all over the world gathered in Berlin yesterday
ahead of today’s biannual world beard and moustache championships. The
participants, including eight from Britain, will do battle in several different
moustache and beard categories this afternoon, including musketeer, wild
west, imperial Austrian, English, Dali and freestyle.

"The beard has to be well looked-after and, of course, it has to
suit the person who is wearing it," Jurgen Draheim, the deputy president
of Berlin’s beard club, and the reigning European champion, explained yesterday. "We
have a lot of entries in the full beard category.

"People who grow beards come from all walks of society," he added. "We
have simple workers and we have academics. I started growing mine as a
revolt against my parents. My mother still tells me to shave it off."

from the Guardian