Microsoft’s new website judges you based on your mustache

This week, Microsoft introduced MyMoustache.net, a website that analyzes men’s moustaches and ranks them against every other player. It’s a lot of fun, just like How-Old.net, Microsoft’s age-guessing website that became a massive hit earlier this year. You can even play if you don’t have any facial hair at all: An “Auto-Stache” feature automatically detects and draws on a beard for you. Better yet, MyMoustache.net is for a good cause: It’s all to raise awareness for the Movember Foundation, the global nonprofit that runs a beard-growing competition to raise funds for men’s health issues like prostate and testicular cancer research. The site is also a way for Microsoft to show off what it’s working on behind the scenes, with smarter applications that can use facial recognition and huge amounts of data to make intelligent guesses by using its Project Oxford technology. “We started with a simple question, ‘What if we could use machine learning technology to detect the length of facial hair?’ Many hallway jokes, brainstorming sessions, and mockups later, our early ideas have been realized far beyond our initial expectations,” writes Microsoft on “the magic” behind the MyMoustache.net website.