The skinny mustache trend men keep reaching for has a new case study, and it plays out in real time across the press circuit for the second season of the Hulu comedy Adults. Malik Elassal, who appeared clean-shaven throughout the first season of the show, has shown up to recent promotional duties wearing a thin strip of hair above his upper lip, the precise style long associated with his co-star Jack Innanen.
Innanen told GQ that he began growing his mustache in 2020, and it became something of a calling card across six years of public appearances and TikTok videos. In Adults, the tidy little mustache was thrown into relief by the clean-shaven faces of Elassal and co-star Owen Thiele. Now Innanen has folded his into a larger beard, and the mustache has migrated, almost physically, across to Elassal’s upper lip.
The Skinny Mustache Trend Men Are Growing in 2024
This is not an isolated incident. The same strip of facial hair has been turning up on a run of younger male faces: Charles Melton, Benson Boone, Timothée Chalamet. The look is narrow, kept strictly to the width of the mouth, trimmed so the hair does not drop past the lip line. It carries a certain studied nonchalance, the kind that signals strong opinions held with complete conviction.
Kirk Riley, master barber and co-founder of the barbershop chain Otis & Finn, has given the style a name: the playboy mustache. Riley brings a decade in the fashion industry to his read of the trend. He started his barbering career in Manhattan before co-founding Otis & Finn, with the first shop opening at Court Square in Long Island City. He now works as head barber at the chain’s 44th Road location, also in Long Island City. When a barber with that kind of background bothers to name a style, it is worth paying attention.
The look Riley describes is defined by how it extends from each corner of the mouth, trimmed carefully to prevent the hair from growing past the lip. That precision is the point. This is not a style that happens by accident or by neglect; it requires maintenance, intention, a certain amount of commitment to an aesthetic that is, on the face of it, slightly absurd and entirely deliberate.
A Break From the Bushier Styles of Earlier Decades
It is a long way from the fuller, denser mustaches of the 1970s and 1980s, the kind associated with Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck. Those styles were about volume, about authority, about filling space. The skinny mustache trend men are currently chasing is doing something different: it is flirtatious rather than imposing, a suggestion rather than a statement.
The shift sits alongside a broader loosening of male grooming habits. Chest hair is back. Longer hair on the head has been gaining ground. There is a general drift away from the buffed-and-shaved look that dominated men’s aesthetics through much of the 2000s and into the following decade. The thin mustache fits neatly into that movement, it is deliberate body hair, worn with full awareness of how it reads.
What makes the Adults moment worth noting is the way the style has moved between co-stars in plain sight, with Innanen’s signature look essentially transferring to Elassal during the press run for a second series. Whether that was a deliberate nod, a coincidence, or simply the skinny mustache doing what the skinny mustache trend men keep discovering it does, which is attach itself and refuse to let go, is not entirely clear. What is clear is that Otis & Finn’s playboy mustache now has enough cultural momentum to migrate from a TikTok comedian’s face to his co-star’s, one press appearance at a time.
