In the pink

How much pink is too much pink?

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and each year more and more consumer products “go pink.” Is it about a good cause, selling products, or a little of both?

“If the AIDS organizations had backed off for one minute on red ribbons, think of where we’d be today,” Nancy Brinker of Susan G. Komen for the Cure told MSNBC.

“Does it trivialize it?” countered Barbara Lippert, a writer. “I think it’s done more good than harm but anything that becomes a big business has a danger of exploitation.

“My daughter-in-law died of breast cancer,” Helga Russell told GoErie.com. “At the end, she told us she was tired of pink. We held a benefit and we wanted to wear pink T-shirts, and she said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Who knows whether the money is actually given to research?'”

The accompanying story points out, for example, that Diet Coke is festooned in pink, but nowhere on the packaging does it indicate any money is going to breast cancer research.

“I think that the pink ribbon, as a symbol, tends to pretty up what is a pretty crappy disease,” a breast cancer survivor told the Boston Globe. “But a pink ribbon is easier to look at than the disease itself.”