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Mustaches: Real people, real voices

Ryan Stewart wasn't sure about his mustache at first. It was thin. It was patchy. And he worried that people might think he was making some sort statement, some sort of ironic statement.

Time passed. The mustache grew. It changed. Ryan changed. "I came to realize something," he says.

Ryan had let other hair on his face grow while he cultivated his mustache. This was a mistake. "It was a skeezy, ratty goatee," he says. "It was my conclusion that this look was worse than the mustache alone. The goatee is not a good look on anybody." So Ryan shaved his extraneous growth. He looked in the mirror. He liked what he saw. "I thought it fit with the long hair. It fit the look." He didn't look like a "dirtball criminal" anymore. No, now he looked more like a member of a Led Zeppelin cover band.

"I call it Stockholm Syndrom of the face," he says about his mustache. "The mustache is my captor. And I'm sympathizing with it."