The History of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and Why It Still Matters
Every October, pink ribbons appear on storefronts, social media feeds, sports uniforms, and fundraising campaigns. Breast Cancer Awareness Month has become so familiar that it can be easy to forget there was a time when breast cancer was discussed far less openly, and when the movement symbolized by that pink ribbon was just beginning.
How Breast Cancer Awareness Month Began
Breast Cancer Awareness Month traces its roots to 1985, when the American Cancer Society helped launch a week-long campaign focused on educating women about breast cancer screening and the importance of routine mammograms. What began as a relatively small educational effort eventually expanded into the month-long observance we recognize every October.
The now-famous pink ribbon became part of the movement several years later. In 1991, the Susan G. Komen Foundation distributed pink ribbons to participants in its New York City Race for the Cure. The following year, SELF magazine editor Alexandra Penney and Estée Lauder executive and breast cancer survivor Evelyn Lauder helped bring the ribbon to a much wider audience by distributing it at Estée Lauder cosmetics counters. Pink soon became internationally recognized as the color of breast cancer awareness.
Why Awareness Still Matters
More than four decades later, Breast Cancer Awareness Month remains important, but its purpose goes far beyond wearing pink.
Breast cancer continues to affect millions of people and their families. In the United States, approximately 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer during her lifetime. At the same time, tremendous progress has been made in screening, treatment, and survival since Breast Cancer Awareness Month began.
October gives us an opportunity to keep that progress moving forward. It can encourage people to learn about their personal risk, talk with their healthcare providers about appropriate screening, support breast cancer research and treatment, and rally around those who are navigating diagnosis, treatment, and life after cancer.
It is also an important reminder that a cancer journey does not necessarily end when treatment does.
For many survivors, healing includes adjusting to physical changes from mastectomies, lumpectomies, chemotherapy and other treatments. Those changes can affect confidence, identity and how someone feels in their own body. That is where organizations like Ink 4 Pink continue the mission of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in a deeply personal way.
Ink 4 Pink helps breast cancer survivors access nipple, breast, eyebrow, and scar camouflage tattooing, providing financial assistance for services that can help survivors feel more at home in their bodies after treatment.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month may be represented by a pink ribbon, but its meaning is much bigger: education, early detection, research, support, survivorship, and hope. This October, wearing pink can be a starting point. What matters most is what we do with the awareness it represents.
