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I loathe Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Don't get me wrong - the idea of promoting breast health is fantastic. I am in a high risk category for breast cancer. When she was 33 years old, my mother noticed pus oozing out of her left nipple. She immediately went to the doctor, and a biopsy indicated that it was breast cancer. With a five year old and an 10 month old at home, my mom was rushed into surgery for a radical mastectomy. This saved her life, and she has been cancer-free for almost thirty years now. I want all women to have the same success rate as my mom, but what October has turned into is a free-for-all profit center for corporations that exploit women's fears and often even sell products that contain cancer causing chemicals.
I wrote extensively about the pink ribbon scams at BlogHer in October 2007 and October 2006, as well as at The Panelist. The first problem with buying pink is that only pennies of your purchase are actually donated to nonprofit breast cancer organizations; the rest of the money goes into corporate profits. The second problem is where your money may or may not go; not all charities are created equally. (For more information on these first two points, check out Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy by Samantha King.) The last (and scariest) issue is that many corporations sell women products that may cause breast cancer under the pink ribbon banner. Last week, GreenGirlyGirl explained how this works:
This year in the US Yoplait is running a pink campaign where you send in a yogurt lid and 10 cents are donated to Breast Cancer. Hmmmm. It costs 39 cents to mail the lid?! You would need to eat 100 yogurts to give $10! Wouldn't it just be easier to donate $10 directly? Plus the yogurt contains dairy product from cows that have been given rBGH (a growth hormone) which may be linked to increased rates of cancer (according to Think Before You Pink, Wal-mart and Starbucks are already making their dairy products rBGH free).
Perhaps the biggest concern for Think Before You Pink though is the cosmetics companies. True, they are amongst the largest fundraisers. But they are very profitable (Estee Lauder sales are over $8 billion; its donation to Pink Ribbon campaign in the US - on the back of selling product - was $500,000). Estee Lauder, as well as every other major cosmetic company, has refused to sign the Compact for Safe Cosmetics. According to the Environmental Working Group in the US only 11% of the 10,500 ingredients in beauty products have been tested. Even of those tested there are those ingredients that have been linked to increased risk for cancer. For example, paraben, a very common ingredient in beauty products, is estrogenetic. The greater our exposure to estrogen, the higher the risk of breast cancer. The cosmetic industry would say that they are present in very small quantities in each product, but it is the sum of all the stuff we put on us that matters.
Think Before You Pink is a wonderful public awareness program conducted by Breast Cancer Action, an advocacy group whose mission "carries the voices of people affected by breast cancer to inspire and compel the changes necessary to end the breast cancer epidemic." Their guidelines on the cause-related marketing of breast cancer are valuable to anyone muddling through the sea of pink this October. Before buying a pink item, BCA suggests that you ask:
- How much money from your purchase actually goes to the cause?
- What is the maximum amount that will be donated?
- How much money was spent marketing the product?
- How are the funds being raised?
- To what breast cancer organization does the money go, and what types of programs does it support?
- What is the company doing to assure that its products are not contributing to the breast cancer epidemic?
In other words, Think Before You Pink. If shopping could cure breast cancer, it would be cured by now.
That said, hundreds of companies are hoping to lure money out of our wallets by slapping a pink ribbon on their products this month. Since laughter is the best medicine (or at the very least, it's better to laugh than cry), I thought it would be fun to highlight some of the most inane, ridiculous, and/or offensive products out there
