Are pink ribbons casting too rosy a glow on the fight against breast cancer?
Samantha King — National Post: Saturday, November 3, 2007. Brenda Sandaluk detests the colour pink. She refused to wear it as a child and to this day the 47-year-old criminal lawyer finds it “cutesy.” Sandaluk is not alone. Because pink has a definite set of social connotations — femininity, girlhood, infantile innocence — people tend to have strong feelings about it: They like it or they loathe it. There are no fence-sitters when it comes to pink. It was precisely because of these associations that pink was chosen by cosmetics company Estée Lauder as the shade for a ribbon it designed for a new breastcancer marketing campaign in 1992. The idea has clearly paid off. Fifteen years later, during the month of October, stores in Canada are flooded with a sea of pink products. There are pink bras and panties, towels and mattresses, kitchen appliances and cookbooks, toilet paper and laundry detergent, Post-it Notes and personalized cheques, power bars and yeast-infection treatments, frozen d
