Anyone who has visited Facebook in the last couple of days has noticed that people have been posting one word color updates. I had no idea what was going on until I finally commented on one that a good friend of mine wrote asking, "What’s with these color updates?"
At the risk of betraying women everywhere, here’s the answer that came in a private message,
Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. Then, send this message on to ONLY girls, no men …. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status. Pass it on & be sure to do your breast self-exams!
I probably broke some secret rule of women but I told all people about it when they asked – men and women alike. Why? Because if you’re going raise breast cancer awareness, I’d venture to say men are equally affected by this terrible disease. Some men do get breast cancer. Others have mothers, sisters, wives who’ve suffered with, survived, or died from it.
Mary Carmichael blogging at Newsweek wrote ,
You know what I didn’t do? Think about breast cancer. That, however, was supposedly the point of the exercise. No one yet knows who started the meme, but apparently, someone kicked it off a few days ago with a chain-letter-style Facebook message to a bunch of women, asking them to virtually flash the world in the name of supporting medical research, and to forward the note only to other female friends, and to be aware of breasts. Sorry, breast cancer. Right.
Maybe people didn’t think about breast cancer and maybe it is a cutesy thing to do. However, we are discussing it now. And when my 14-year old Erin asked, "What’s with that?" I told her. Then I told her about how important it is to perform a breast examination every month. So even though the thought of this mini-meme seems silly on the front end, it did open a door for me to talk about breast cancer with my daughter. I hope other women also talked to their own daughters.
pink. blue. white. paisley. nude.
People are talking about it. At the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, they’ve seen a spike in "fans" according to The Washington Post ,
Whatever it is, its impact was immediate and dramatic: As bra colors went flying around the net, something strange happened at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. After two years of intensive efforts to boost its profile through social networking, hiring two full-time people to do solely that, within two hours Friday morning, their fan base on Facebook exploded from 135 to 700.
Maybe our silly colors are helping raise awareness. And in case you want to know, mine is pink.
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