Inside the Weird World of the Hairiest Sport: Competitive Bearding

“Weirdos and beardos” united at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom last month for the fifth New York City Beard & Moustache Competition. The night featured fierce races in categories including Full Natural Beard Over 8″, Cropped Beard/Starter Beard, Fake Creative Beard or Moustache and Freestyle Beard. Simon Cleveland, the president of the Gotham City Beard Alliance, describes the last category as “massive amounts of hair spray and beards warped into geometric shapes and patterns you’d never see in nature.”

In the thick of the competition, we met a beard fanatic named Guido Cappello, who told us he thinks hairy faces should be mandatory. “I feel every man should have some sort of facial hair, whether it’s a moustache or a beard. You grow it for a reason. Grow it and be proud of it.” See what his beard (and the Best in Show’s) look like in our footage from the scene.