I sat the other evening, watching part of a box set of Poirot. The famous Belgian detective spent a while looking into a mirror and declared that it was time to spend an hour or so cutting and pomading his moustache.
I was fascinated and intrigued by ‘pomade’. Monsieur Poirot is well known for having one of the best kept upper lips in the film and TV scene. I’ve seen the contraption he heads off to bed with that looks like a miniature hammock strung between his ears to make sure that his moustache suffers no damage and doesn’t get knocked out of shape overnight.
It also interested me because I have fallen out of love with moustache wax. I have tried a few over the years and I have come down recently on the tiny tin of Bounders. I have had some issue with it to the extent that I had trimmed the excesses of a full swirly handlebar style appendage back to a fairly standard ‘tache because I was getting fed up of the ‘pull’ I felt on my top lip after a couple of weeks of application.
I will admit that I didn’t wash the wax out because working the wax into the hair was part of the effect. The other issue with wax is that it’s hard at anything less than a warm room temperature and is best when warmed. Come to a tin than has been left in a cold bathroom overnight and you will find a very hard lump of wax that takes quite a lot of warming to make it workable and ready for application onto your appendage.
So I decided that if a Pomade was good enough for one of the worlds greatest moustache owner then I should at least give it a road test.
First I wanted to establish what a Pomade was in this day and age. An internet search reveals that Pomade is a common hairdressing product of the old school, used to create some of those amazing and shiny hair styles of the 50’s and 60’s. Pomades, it appeared came in a number of consistencies and as I was looking, ideally for something lighter than my seriously stiffening wax I was after a lighter one with a minimum of wax. As with other products I was also looking for something with no perfume so that it didn’t clash with my chosen eau de toilette.
I landed on Murray’s Superior Hair Dressing Pomade which originates in the US and, as I gather from the tin has been styling hair since the days Poirot was created in the 1920’s. It comes in a huge tin which is likely to last me as long as I have a moustache. The first thing I discovered was that it appears to be workable at a cool room temperature. After a couple of weeks I have found that running a thumb and forefinger half way around the tin will allow me to pick up enough to style one side of my moustache, working it in well and adding a small extra drop if the required curl is not immediately achieved. This is then repeated on the other side. The effect is just what I hoped. The Pomade is light, the curl of my moustache is perfect and not rigid, over the course of a day I can quickly twirl up a storm if required and I feel no pull as I did with traditional wax. By the end of the day the effect is wearing off and if I am going out in the evening a second application is required but having applied my pomade and my ‘little grey cells’ the issue of moustache styling I am coming down firmly on the side of Pomade, so thanks Hercule!
