A word about pink

Mattel Top Models Summer, Teresa, Nikki, and Barbie wear pink
in my designs for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The breast cancer awareness movement began when the first Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure® was held twenty-five years ago, in October 1983, in Dallas, Texas, with eight hundred participants. By 2002, more than 1.3 million people participated in races throughout the U.S. and other parts of the world.

The first pink ribbons connected to breast cancer awareness were handed out at the 1991 New York City race for breast cancer survivors. In 1993, Evelyn Lauder of the Estée Lauder Companies founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and established the Pink Ribbon as its symbol.

During this month, many companies adorn thousands of products with pink ribbons, color their products pink, or otherwise specially package them with a pledge to donate a portion of their sales to support breast cancer awareness and research. Several advocacy groups reject such commercialization as a marketing ploy, and question the use of possible cancer-causing agents in some of the very products sold to raise money. Even Barbie was in the middle of the controversy in 2006.

I might not buy a product specifically for the purpose of raising money (say, a pink Dyson vacuum cleaner, because for one thing, it’s out of my price range), but if I’m buying something I use or need anyway, it’s nice to know some of the money will go to breast cancer research. You already know which side I’m on in the Unrealistic Body Image Doll versus the Develop Your Imagination Doll battle. Politicize dolls if you must, but I had a step-grandmother who had a radical mastectomy and lived to be old enough for me to know her as my only grandmother. Her spirit, her love for my grandfather and my family, and her kindness to the bashful child I was, made her beautiful, and no Barbie has ever made me see her any other way.