Wednesday
Jul092008
The Pink Ribbon
Wednesday, July 9, 2008 Author: Brittany Lynn Runyan
The truth behind all that pink fluff!
Pinkwashing: a term used to describe the activities of companies and groups that position themselves as leaders in the struggle to eradicate breast cancer while engaging in practices that may be contributing to rising rates of the disease.
Pink It Up:
What we find in the mainstream culture is a revolution in shopping. We can “shower for the cure” with pink ribbon gel, dusk our cheeks with “Hint of a Cure” blush and “Kiss Good Bye to Breast Cancer” with Avon lipstick. We can “test drive a BMW for the cure,” buy an iPod “Case for a Cause” and “save lids to save lives” with Yoplait yogurt – though you’d have to eat three yogurts a day for nine months to raise $36 for the cause, points out the nonprofit group Breast Cancer Action on their “Think Before You Pink” website. The site urges consumers to ask critical questions about pink-ribbon products and promotions, such as: How much money goes to the cause? What is it supporting? What is the company doing to ensure its products don’t contribute to breast cancer?
Some pink-ribbon promoters would rather not confront such questions. For instance, the cosmetic companies’ high-profile efforts to raise money for the cause include Revlon’s 5K Run/Walk and the Estée Lauder Companies’ Annual Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign – billed as “the Power of a Pink Promise”. Yet both companies were singled out in the 2005 Skin Deep report, which included a list of “Top 20 Brands of Concern” based on toxicity. Revlon’s Ultima II and the Estée Lauder brand were 8 and 9 (10 being the worst) on the list, respectively. Both companies make products that contain suspected carcinogens and hormone-disrupting chemicals, as does Avon, which claims to be the largest corporate supporter of the breast cancer cause in the US. Through their trade association, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, the companies opposed a California bill that would require cosmetics companies to disclose their use of chemicals linked to cancer or birth defects. And none of the three companies has signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics, a pledge to remove hazardous chemicals and replace them with safer alternatives.
All of this outrages Jeanne Rizzo of the Breast Cancer Fund. “If they’re concerned about the cause and prevention side of the disease – and I don’t know how they could not be – Estée Lauder, Revlon and Avon ought to be in the leadership on this issue, not having to be pushed on it,” Rizzo said. “When new knowledge comes to you that your product contains problematic ingredients, if you were authentic in your support for breast cancer, you would be vigilant in addressing that.” Instead, the pink-ribbon cosmetics companies defend their use of hazardous chemicals (“it’s just a little bit”) and fight to keep their industry unregulated. “It points out a lack of sincerity about the issue. They chose breast cancer because it’s women and that’s their market.”
It’s not that having an iconic symbol for a disease is a bad idea, Rizzo points out. For many women, wearing the pink ribbon and participating in community events is important and validating. But the pink ribbon, with its carefully contrived message about “awareness” and “hoping for the cure,” also serves to distract from a deeper public discussion about preventable causes of breast cancer. “It is the very blandness of breast cancer, at least in mainstream perceptions, that makes it an attractive object of corporate charity and a way for companies to brand themselves friends of the middle-aged female market,” wrote author Barbara Ehrenreich. Companies want to support breast cancer because “breast cancer is safe,” said Carol Cone, who helped kick off “cause marketing” in the 1980s with research showing that, given the same cost and quality, more than half of consumers would switch from a particular brand to one associated with a good cause. With breast cancer “there was no concern that you might actually turn off your audience because of the lifestyle or sexual connotations that AIDS has,” Amy Langer, director of the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations, told the New York Times in 1996. “That gives corporations a certain freedom and a certain relief in supporting the cause.” Or, as National’s Women’s Health Network director Cindy Pearson put it: “Breast cancer provides a way of doing something for women, without being feminist.”
And there’s a rub. With its focus on moving products, the pink ribbon excludes all notions of feminism, activism, corporate accountability or changing the status quo. Instead, the public conversation – and much of the research – narrows in on a set of topics that don’t rain on the corporate cash parade. We hear a lot of hype about pharmaceutical solutions for breast cancer, but not much about prevention strategies such as cleaning up carcinogens in the environment. We hear that fewer women are dying of breast cancer, but there’s little discussion about how many more women are getting the disease. We’re told to take personal responsibility and make good lifestyle choices, such as eating right and exercising. But there’s barely a whisper about industry’s responsibility to reduce pollution and use precaution. Tugging the ends of the pink ribbon, one starts to unravel some reasons why.
Raining Ribbons:
The pink ribbon was originally neither pink nor was it intended to be used as a marketing tool. It was a peach ribbon developed in the early 1990s by Charlotte Haley, who watched her daughter, sister and grandmother suffer breast cancer. Angry and determined to start a grassroots movement, Charlotte sat down at her dining room table and crafted thousands of peach ribbons by hand. She bundled them into sets of five, each with a card that read: “The National Cancer Institute annual budget is $1.8 billion; only 5 percent goes for cancer prevention. Help us wake up our legislators and America by wearing this ribbon.” She distributed the bundles at her local supermarket and wrote to Dear Abby and other prominent women to call attention to the campaign.
At that time, breast cancer was just starting to come out of the closet, and a couple of major corporations had big plans. Estée Lauder and Self magazine teamed up to create the second annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month issue, and they envisioned a breast cancer ribbon displayed on cosmetic counters from coast to coast. But somebody already had a breast cancer ribbon, they were told. So they called up Charlotte Haley offering to partner with her and take her peach ribbon national. “She wanted nothing to do with us. She said we were too commercial,” Self magazine editor Alexandra Penney explained to MAMM magazine. For Charlotte, the ribbon was a tool to inspire women to become politically active, not to sell products. But her vision was not to be realized. Estée Lauder and Self really wanted that ribbon. Their lawyers advised them to choose another color. Pink, a life-affirming color known for its calming, quieting, stress-reducing effects, was the color chosen. “In focus groups and studies, pink came out as something that was warm, happy, pleasant and playful, which is everything that breast cancer is not for women who are living with the disease,” commented Brenda Salgado of Breast Cancer Action. “So that’s where the pink ribbon was born. And Charlotte Haley’s peach ribbon just kind of disappeared, inundated under pink ribbons ever after.”
Cancer Inc.:
Unraveling the ribbon further, one finds even more disturbing contents inside the pink package. “They make the chemicals, they run the treatment centers, and they’re still looking for ‘the cure’ – no wonder they won’t tell you about breast cancer prevention,” begins the expose by Sharon Batt and Liza Gross in Sierra magazine. It’s the most straightforward way to put it.
The co-founder and major sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is AstraZeneca (formerly known as Zeneca), a British-based multinational giant that manufactures the cancer drug tamoxifen, the most widely prescribed breast cancer drug. Until 2000, the company was also a leading manufacturer of agricultural chemicals, including the carcinogenic pesticide acetochlor. When Zeneca created National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985, it was owned by Imperial Chemical Industries, a multibillion-dollar producer of pesticides, paper and plastics. The company was named in a 1990 lawsuit by the federal government for allegedly dumping DDT and PCBs into the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. After buying up cancer clinics around the country, Zeneca merged with the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra in 1999 to form AstraZeneca, the world’s third largest drug company.
“This is a conflict of interest unparalleled in the history of American medicine,” said Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. “You’ve got a company that’s a spin-off of one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of carcinogenic chemicals, they’ve got control of breast cancer treatment, they’ve got control of the chemoprevention [studies], and now they have control of cancer treatment in eleven centers – which are clearly going to be prescribing the drugs they manufacture.
They’ve also got control over the public message of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which focuses on early detection – in other words, find out if you’re already got the disease. “The awareness is about getting your mammograms and getting the pills,” said Brenda Salgado. “It focuses all our attention on ‘early detection’ and ‘cure,’ which is important for women who currently have cancer, but it keeps us away from the equally important effort of preventing women from getting the disease in the first place. It also avoids the critical questions the breast cancer epidemic raises. What is the connection between environmental toxins and breast cancer? And why has the incidence of breast cancer risen, despite the ‘war on cancer’ and all the money spent on research?”
The nation’s largest breast cancer charities fall in line with similar messages about early detection and cure, and divert public attention away from prevention strategies in ways that are sometimes not so subtle. The American Cancer Society (ACS), for instance, is frequently quoted in the press urging cautious interpretation of evidence linking chemicals to disease. As one example: a July 2005 New York Times story entitled “Should You Worry about the Chemicals in Your Makeup?” quoted Dr. Michael Thun, head of epidemiology at ACS, questioning the science on phthalates. “There are real uncertainties about animal studies,” Thun said. However, expert panels as the US National Toxicology Program have said the animal studies on phthalates are likely to predict human reproductive health effects.
ACS also dismissed a report by the California EPA, based on an exhaustive analysis of two decades of research, that second-hand smoke is linked to premenopausal breast cancer. According to Jeanne Rizzo of the Breast Cancer Fund, this is an indication of an institutionalized culture of resistance. “Not only is the American Cancer Society not taking leadership, there’s a resistance,” she said. “They are willing to look at alcohol, obesity, diet and genetics. But are they willing to look at what’s making girls go into puberty early? Are they willing to look at the links between chemicals and cancer? Their focus is on a cure. There’s a normalization of cancer in that model when you don’t look at causes of cancer. It’s like saying you’re going to get it – but we’ll cure it.”
Part of chapter 6 from the book, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry.
Pinkwashing: a term used to describe the activities of companies and groups that position themselves as leaders in the struggle to eradicate breast cancer while engaging in practices that may be contributing to rising rates of the disease.
Pink It Up:
What we find in the mainstream culture is a revolution in shopping. We can “shower for the cure” with pink ribbon gel, dusk our cheeks with “Hint of a Cure” blush and “Kiss Good Bye to Breast Cancer” with Avon lipstick. We can “test drive a BMW for the cure,” buy an iPod “Case for a Cause” and “save lids to save lives” with Yoplait yogurt – though you’d have to eat three yogurts a day for nine months to raise $36 for the cause, points out the nonprofit group Breast Cancer Action on their “Think Before You Pink” website. The site urges consumers to ask critical questions about pink-ribbon products and promotions, such as: How much money goes to the cause? What is it supporting? What is the company doing to ensure its products don’t contribute to breast cancer?
Some pink-ribbon promoters would rather not confront such questions. For instance, the cosmetic companies’ high-profile efforts to raise money for the cause include Revlon’s 5K Run/Walk and the Estée Lauder Companies’ Annual Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign – billed as “the Power of a Pink Promise”. Yet both companies were singled out in the 2005 Skin Deep report, which included a list of “Top 20 Brands of Concern” based on toxicity. Revlon’s Ultima II and the Estée Lauder brand were 8 and 9 (10 being the worst) on the list, respectively. Both companies make products that contain suspected carcinogens and hormone-disrupting chemicals, as does Avon, which claims to be the largest corporate supporter of the breast cancer cause in the US. Through their trade association, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, the companies opposed a California bill that would require cosmetics companies to disclose their use of chemicals linked to cancer or birth defects. And none of the three companies has signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics, a pledge to remove hazardous chemicals and replace them with safer alternatives.
All of this outrages Jeanne Rizzo of the Breast Cancer Fund. “If they’re concerned about the cause and prevention side of the disease – and I don’t know how they could not be – Estée Lauder, Revlon and Avon ought to be in the leadership on this issue, not having to be pushed on it,” Rizzo said. “When new knowledge comes to you that your product contains problematic ingredients, if you were authentic in your support for breast cancer, you would be vigilant in addressing that.” Instead, the pink-ribbon cosmetics companies defend their use of hazardous chemicals (“it’s just a little bit”) and fight to keep their industry unregulated. “It points out a lack of sincerity about the issue. They chose breast cancer because it’s women and that’s their market.”
It’s not that having an iconic symbol for a disease is a bad idea, Rizzo points out. For many women, wearing the pink ribbon and participating in community events is important and validating. But the pink ribbon, with its carefully contrived message about “awareness” and “hoping for the cure,” also serves to distract from a deeper public discussion about preventable causes of breast cancer. “It is the very blandness of breast cancer, at least in mainstream perceptions, that makes it an attractive object of corporate charity and a way for companies to brand themselves friends of the middle-aged female market,” wrote author Barbara Ehrenreich. Companies want to support breast cancer because “breast cancer is safe,” said Carol Cone, who helped kick off “cause marketing” in the 1980s with research showing that, given the same cost and quality, more than half of consumers would switch from a particular brand to one associated with a good cause. With breast cancer “there was no concern that you might actually turn off your audience because of the lifestyle or sexual connotations that AIDS has,” Amy Langer, director of the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations, told the New York Times in 1996. “That gives corporations a certain freedom and a certain relief in supporting the cause.” Or, as National’s Women’s Health Network director Cindy Pearson put it: “Breast cancer provides a way of doing something for women, without being feminist.”
And there’s a rub. With its focus on moving products, the pink ribbon excludes all notions of feminism, activism, corporate accountability or changing the status quo. Instead, the public conversation – and much of the research – narrows in on a set of topics that don’t rain on the corporate cash parade. We hear a lot of hype about pharmaceutical solutions for breast cancer, but not much about prevention strategies such as cleaning up carcinogens in the environment. We hear that fewer women are dying of breast cancer, but there’s little discussion about how many more women are getting the disease. We’re told to take personal responsibility and make good lifestyle choices, such as eating right and exercising. But there’s barely a whisper about industry’s responsibility to reduce pollution and use precaution. Tugging the ends of the pink ribbon, one starts to unravel some reasons why.
Raining Ribbons:
The pink ribbon was originally neither pink nor was it intended to be used as a marketing tool. It was a peach ribbon developed in the early 1990s by Charlotte Haley, who watched her daughter, sister and grandmother suffer breast cancer. Angry and determined to start a grassroots movement, Charlotte sat down at her dining room table and crafted thousands of peach ribbons by hand. She bundled them into sets of five, each with a card that read: “The National Cancer Institute annual budget is $1.8 billion; only 5 percent goes for cancer prevention. Help us wake up our legislators and America by wearing this ribbon.” She distributed the bundles at her local supermarket and wrote to Dear Abby and other prominent women to call attention to the campaign.
At that time, breast cancer was just starting to come out of the closet, and a couple of major corporations had big plans. Estée Lauder and Self magazine teamed up to create the second annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month issue, and they envisioned a breast cancer ribbon displayed on cosmetic counters from coast to coast. But somebody already had a breast cancer ribbon, they were told. So they called up Charlotte Haley offering to partner with her and take her peach ribbon national. “She wanted nothing to do with us. She said we were too commercial,” Self magazine editor Alexandra Penney explained to MAMM magazine. For Charlotte, the ribbon was a tool to inspire women to become politically active, not to sell products. But her vision was not to be realized. Estée Lauder and Self really wanted that ribbon. Their lawyers advised them to choose another color. Pink, a life-affirming color known for its calming, quieting, stress-reducing effects, was the color chosen. “In focus groups and studies, pink came out as something that was warm, happy, pleasant and playful, which is everything that breast cancer is not for women who are living with the disease,” commented Brenda Salgado of Breast Cancer Action. “So that’s where the pink ribbon was born. And Charlotte Haley’s peach ribbon just kind of disappeared, inundated under pink ribbons ever after.”
Cancer Inc.:
Unraveling the ribbon further, one finds even more disturbing contents inside the pink package. “They make the chemicals, they run the treatment centers, and they’re still looking for ‘the cure’ – no wonder they won’t tell you about breast cancer prevention,” begins the expose by Sharon Batt and Liza Gross in Sierra magazine. It’s the most straightforward way to put it.
The co-founder and major sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is AstraZeneca (formerly known as Zeneca), a British-based multinational giant that manufactures the cancer drug tamoxifen, the most widely prescribed breast cancer drug. Until 2000, the company was also a leading manufacturer of agricultural chemicals, including the carcinogenic pesticide acetochlor. When Zeneca created National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985, it was owned by Imperial Chemical Industries, a multibillion-dollar producer of pesticides, paper and plastics. The company was named in a 1990 lawsuit by the federal government for allegedly dumping DDT and PCBs into the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. After buying up cancer clinics around the country, Zeneca merged with the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra in 1999 to form AstraZeneca, the world’s third largest drug company.
“This is a conflict of interest unparalleled in the history of American medicine,” said Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. “You’ve got a company that’s a spin-off of one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of carcinogenic chemicals, they’ve got control of breast cancer treatment, they’ve got control of the chemoprevention [studies], and now they have control of cancer treatment in eleven centers – which are clearly going to be prescribing the drugs they manufacture.
They’ve also got control over the public message of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which focuses on early detection – in other words, find out if you’re already got the disease. “The awareness is about getting your mammograms and getting the pills,” said Brenda Salgado. “It focuses all our attention on ‘early detection’ and ‘cure,’ which is important for women who currently have cancer, but it keeps us away from the equally important effort of preventing women from getting the disease in the first place. It also avoids the critical questions the breast cancer epidemic raises. What is the connection between environmental toxins and breast cancer? And why has the incidence of breast cancer risen, despite the ‘war on cancer’ and all the money spent on research?”
The nation’s largest breast cancer charities fall in line with similar messages about early detection and cure, and divert public attention away from prevention strategies in ways that are sometimes not so subtle. The American Cancer Society (ACS), for instance, is frequently quoted in the press urging cautious interpretation of evidence linking chemicals to disease. As one example: a July 2005 New York Times story entitled “Should You Worry about the Chemicals in Your Makeup?” quoted Dr. Michael Thun, head of epidemiology at ACS, questioning the science on phthalates. “There are real uncertainties about animal studies,” Thun said. However, expert panels as the US National Toxicology Program have said the animal studies on phthalates are likely to predict human reproductive health effects.
ACS also dismissed a report by the California EPA, based on an exhaustive analysis of two decades of research, that second-hand smoke is linked to premenopausal breast cancer. According to Jeanne Rizzo of the Breast Cancer Fund, this is an indication of an institutionalized culture of resistance. “Not only is the American Cancer Society not taking leadership, there’s a resistance,” she said. “They are willing to look at alcohol, obesity, diet and genetics. But are they willing to look at what’s making girls go into puberty early? Are they willing to look at the links between chemicals and cancer? Their focus is on a cure. There’s a normalization of cancer in that model when you don’t look at causes of cancer. It’s like saying you’re going to get it – but we’ll cure it.”
Part of chapter 6 from the book, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry.
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