Weary of Pink

If you left your house during last month, you likely saw products emblazoned with pink ribbons grace the shelves of grocery and retail outlets. You turned on the TV and saw NFL teams playing in pink shoes and socks. October has been designated “breast cancer awareness month,” but selling pink merchandise under the guise of awareness amounts to little else than being a subtle way of using sex to sell and to get money from well-meaning consumers.

One day in early October, I walked through the Mall of America and was barraged by pink. It was impossible to escape. Nearly every store was selling something specifically for breast cancer awareness. Later that same day, I stopped at a Walgreens location and discovered that there was even a pink Snuggie.

Every time I encountered something pink, I was reminded that my mother was dead. My mother had died of breast cancer at the age of 38 in 1996–I was eight and my sister was five. Over 13 years later, my family is still experiencing the aftershocks of losing the person who glued us all together.

There is nothing that stops a company from slapping a pink ribbon onto a package and toting it as “breast cancer awareness,” when there is no donation to anything but the company. The pink ribbon is not regulated, and is easy to abuse.

Often, a portion of the proceeds are supposedly going towards research, and other times the product (in one case, General Mills’ Cheerios) mentioned that the company was going to donate money regardless of product purchases. In Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” drive, you mail in lids from yogurt cups. A single lid fetches 10 cents for breast cancer research. If you sent three lids a day for four months, your total donation would be only $36.

I find it hard to swallow the sincerity of commercial interests. If marketing things for breast cancer awareness weren’t a guaranteed way to make money from consumers with a conscious, companies would not be doing so.