Arts & Entertainment
Two Bay Area Men Seeking Facial Hair Supremacy
Tyler Templeton and Brian Werle will be among contestants at a national beard and moustache championship competition this weekend in New Orleans.
Written by Bay City News Service
Two Bay Area men and their facial hair were making their way to New Orleans Friday, Sept. 6 to compete in the fourth annual Just For Men National Beard and Moustache Championships.
The competition kicks off Friday night before a Saturday morning
parade to the House of Blues where the hundreds of "beardsmen" will be judged.
Among them will be San Francisco resident Tyler Templeton, 24 and Napa resident Brian Werle, 29. The Bay Area men will join contestants from around the nation competing in 18 categories that include Salvador Dali-style mustaches to full-length beards cut and styled in abstract ways.
The hirsute men will be displaying various mustaches, full beards or partial beards, which includes Amish beards and side burns.
Werle earned a third-place medal at the competition last year in Las Vegas in the English mustache category. He is returning to the competition this year sporting a long slender mustache and hoping to out “stache" the competition.
"Now that I've already placed," Werle said, "now the pressure is on to do as good."
The teacher has been growing his facial hair for almost two years and it has reached nearly 16 inches, or almost shoulder-width, he said.
He said when walking around people ask if they can take a picture with him and his mustache, which he sometimes curls up at the ends. "I understand this is a pretty ridiculous mustache," he said.
In Las Vegas, Werle said he saw some memorable beards, including a beard sculpted to look like a globe complete with continents and bodies of water.
"There are definitely some serious competitors," he said.
The competition can be fierce with some refusing to talk about their grooming routines, he said.
"They don't want to give away any secrets," he said.
Others participate because it's fun, enjoyable and a friendly
environment, he said.
It’s a new experience for Templeton who is participating in his first competition in the full beard category.
After a year-and-a-half of growth, Templeton said he figured that now is the time to enter the competition, saying "I'm pretty young and I've got a pretty big beard. I might not have another chance."
Templeton said he's going without any expectations, but he's researched and found online videos of previous competitions where he said it appears to get "pretty silly," although some competitors take it seriously.
Hours before flying out of San Francisco International Airport for
the Big Easy, Templeton said he was excited to see "a big concentration of people
with facial hair."
He acknowledged that he will be one of the younger competitors, which may be a disadvantage.
"People have been growing beards longer than I've been alive," he said.
Templeton moved from Florida more than a year ago to study creative writing at a graduate program at San Francisco State University and said people often notice his voluminous beard.
"The funniest are little kids," he said. "All of them look and stare and look a little frightened by it."
More information about the competition is available at beardteamusa.org.
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