IT WAS once called the must-have fashion accessory of the year by one of the publishing industry's top style magazines for men.
The cravat?
The Bay City Rollers tartan trousers perhaps?
Or even the tank top.
No, I'm afraid it's far worse than that.
The moustache is back.
It's all part of an annual fundraising campaign called Tacheback, launched by the male cancer charity Everyman, which asks us to grow a moustache for the month of September and raise money for their cause.
And you know? I am not at all tempted, because I've been through all this agony before. Granted, the 13 colleagues who grew moustaches a few years ago for the same campaign raised a fair bit of money, but as I discovered over the 30-day period, there's nothing more likely to invoke a period of celibacy than a hairy top lip.
I started growing a moustache at the age of 15, in the halcyon days when a fine bush under the nose was a sign of a man's virulence and ability to put up shelves, drink pints of pale ale and have his wife make him a cooked breakfast every morning.
Sadly, it was a rather wispy, pathetic effort, which from a few yards away made onlookers think that my eyebrows had simply come down for a drink.
I would love to say that it made me look like Tom Selleck or Errol Flynn, but over the years, it grew, albeit like a parched lawn, until I looked like one of the Mexican bandits who gets shot by Clint Eastwood in the first three minutes of a spaghetti Western.
When comic Steve Coogan unveiled a new character - a moustachioed Portugese crooner called Tony Ferrino - my younger brother sincerely believed it was me.
The end came when a friend who also possessed a tache informed me that he had shaved his off the night before after being asked to dance in a nightclub by a bloke who looked like his Dad.
A few years ago, the temptation was too much to bear, especially as I also appear to find shaving the upper part of my lip the most difficult of my depilatory tasks and generally end up looking like a victim in a Sam Peckinpah film with half a toilet roll stuck to my face.
I am also due to renew my passport shortly and while my current photograph is a fair reflection of my current look - apart from the strange dark colour of the hair - I am certainly not going to spend the next decade living with the nightmare I suffered throughout the 80s.
I firstly had passport that featured my one and only true fashion disaster... a Kevin Keegan-style perm.
The ten-year passport outlived the perm by fully nine years and it was a great day in my life when I could finally replace it... with a picture of myself featuring a striking Pancho Villa-style tache.
Ten years on, the great day arrived and I could finally have a passport which didn't necessitate airport officials doing triple takes, making frantic telephone calls to security or simply laughing at the perm.
So I'll pass on the invitation to grow another one thanks... I'd much prefer to sit in a bathful of cold baked beans.
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