Friday, January 08, 2010

What color is your bra?

By the end of this week women, and some men, were posting just a color in their status update ... white, beige, black, blue ... none. What did it mean? It didn't take long to figure out it was the bra color of the woman posting.

It's unknown who started this "campaign" but the end result was that for at least a day, people on Facebook were talking about breast cancer.

The world awoke Friday to discover that Davi’s bra is black. Janet’s is blue with bows. Kim’s is pink. And Susan’s is a “decadent beige.”

The colors were, at first at least, somewhat mystifyingly posted on thousands upon thousands of Facebook pages as their status updates, without any context. Just colors. “White .. for today anyway!” wrote Kerri.

By midday, the color craze had gone viral on the Internet and around the globe, as had the word that the colors were really bra colors. Almost immediately, cyber-arguments erupted about what it all meant. The blogosphere went wild. Was so openly and willingly posting something as intimate as one’s bra color an attempt to raise breast cancer awareness? Or was it all just another Facebook ‘send your friend a snowball’ or ‘take your celebrity boyfriend quiz’ silly game? A meme?

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.
But it can't stop there. We must commit everyday to doing all we can to stop breast cancer, and all the other forms of cancer that have killed so many people we love.

The first thing you can do is take preventative measures. Have that mammogram, lower the fat content in your diet, stop smoking. Don't do it as a New Years Resolution that will be broken almost as quickly as it took to utter the words. Make a commitment.

Urge friends and family to do the same.

I'm sure there's more we can do ... post your ideas below.

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