Pinkwashing: The Downside of "Breast Cancer Awareness" Month

On the aisles of a local store, one can’t really ignore the proliferation of pink packaged products, all lined up and ready to help consumers “help” breast cancer research. The pink ribbon and the pinkness of everything around October is seemingly done up with good intentions. After all, it’s to help promote awareness; a portion of your proceeds when you purchase that pink ribbon item is going toward a charity of some sort. Right?
 
Take Yoplait’s Save Lids to Save Lives campaign for example. Yoplait will donate 10 cents to the Susan G Komen Foundation to every lid that’s collected and sent back. As Sarah Mahoney of MediaPost pointed out, imagine how much Yoplait costs in the first place, add in the cost of stamp, and you might just want to simply donate your cash directly to the foundation instead of buying Yoplait. This logic works for nearly every single item that you might consider purchasing for the sake of breast cancer research. Why not just donate to the charity directly instead of buying something?
 
To some, products like these might make contributing to charity “efficient.”  If you’re buying a product, why not buy one that donates a portion of its proceeds to an organization that helps fight breast cancer? It innately makes you feel better to be buying that product. You’re buying bread, milk and yogurt already, why not? That’s exactly what corporations want you to think. Breast Cancer Awareness has become a marketing campaign where companies can appear like they care and are therefore far more worthy of your dollar than other products.
 
This proliferation of items claiming to support Breast Cancer Awareness makes everything appear as if the effort is moving along just fine. If we take a look around the numbers of pinked-up items, it wouldn’t be presumptuous to assume that people are willing to give, that the cause has both awareness and money. Right?
 
Fran Visco, who is the National Breast Cancer Coalistion president, wrote on the Huffington Post that “ Twenty five years ago, in the United States, 110 women died of breast cancer every day. Twenty five years and billions of private and public research dollars later, that number is 110. Every day. Not much progress, is it?” 
 
Visco publically declares that she’s not celebrating Breast Cancer Awareness Month, because to her, the statistics aren’t worth celebrating and neither is the progress.
 
October has become a month that’s more about consumers making themselves feel better than it is about properly addressing the truth about the problems within the field of breast cancer research  
 
Despite all these pink ribbons, can the average women accurately name off information on preventing breast cancer, things to avoid, and the chemicals around our daily lives that studies have shown to contribute to it? Probably not, but at least we’re all aware that the pink ribbon on whatever item you’re buying  is associated with Breast Cancer Awareness.