How can you not love the annual Honest Amish Beard and Mustache Championship? It’s this type of absurdity that our complicated world needs.

Here are some of our favorites from the 2023 championship. What’s your favorite? We’ve paired this over-the-top contest with an absurd poem that encapsulates the mantra of the beard and mustache lover.

 

Photographs by Elle Jaye.

 

In the land of whiskers wide and long, where beards and mustaches grow strong, lived faces with hair, oh so grand, stretching like vines across the land.

 

In this kingdom of hairy delight, mustaches twirled up to great height, curled like spirals, bold and vast, casting shadows as they passed.

 

Beards too, in their splendid sprawl, grew so long, they’d trip and fall, woven, braided, some adorned with beads, a forest of follicles, sprouting like weeds.

One beard housed a family of birds, nesting peacefully, without words, while a mustache, thick and wide, served as a playground slide.

In the town square, if rumors be true, a beard once caught a sneeze, “Achoo!” And out flew a cat, a book, and a broom, from the depths of its hairy tomb.


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Author

Ben VanderVeen is the founder and editor of Moss & Fog, one of the web’s longest-running visual culture destinations. Since 2009, he’s been finding and framing the most beautiful, surprising, and thought-provoking work in art, architecture, design, and nature — reaching over 325,000 readers each month. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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