Women grin and bare it on Facebook

By now you must have figured what was up with the colour-coded updates of your female friends on Facebook on freaky Friday.

Of course, till afternoon, most men were momentarily foxed with the in-joke (read: among women only) streaming their pages with status messages like white, black, red, leopard, beige, ‘nothing’, ‘is officially colour-blind’...

The secret was out soon: these were the colours of the bras worn by the women. A search revealed that the origin of this campaign lies in a blog where the following post was up: “In honour of breast cancer awareness, we are playing a game...... silly, but fun! Write the colour of your bra as your status, just the colour, nothing else!!

Copy this and pass it on to all Females ...... NO MEN!! This will be fun to see how it spreads, and we are leaving the men wondering why all females just have a colour as their status!!”

“I was told about this by a friend last night and then it was all about ‘let’s fool the guys’. So, I put up my colour because it was creative and a girl thing. Only this afternoon did I get another message associating it with breast cancer awareness,” says Jui Lele, assistant manager, Globosport.

YK Sapru, chairman and CEO, Cancer Patients Aid
Society, India, says, “This campaign would have been started by the American Cancer Society. I am not very sure whether the campaign works for India, but I am sure it has generated some amount of inquisitiveness.”   

Actor Renuka Shahane, who has been creating awareness for the cause, says, “Well, it is rather interesting but I think the men should be equally aware of the cause. A lone ‘pink’ or ‘red’ as a status line would be rather ambiguous.”

“It was a fun thing to do because everyone in office was doing it and even though it didn’t seem to be about breast cancer, the idea might stick. If the idea was awareness, then an information link would have really helped,” says Urvashi Choubey, management trainee, Hanmer HSL.

So was it a fun marketing survey of women’s bra preferences/fantasies and men’s reaction to that, some project to spice up a sometimes predictable Facebook experience, Facebook’s possible attempt at stealing Twitter’s thunder, or a way to make women think of the very real threat of breast cancer? Whatever the reason, it proved to be sticky.

“A possible reason it went viral was the association of the bra with women’s liberation, the idea of freedom,” says Krishnapriya Banerjee, analyst, McKinsey & Company.
And as news cycle on the Internet goes, most men took over at #umbra on Twitter, in a bid to keep “a-breast” with the ‘loose talk’ and coming up with ‘BRA’ infested one-liners at the speed of crackling mass hysteria about the contraption. A Facebook user’s exasperation by the end of it came with one final, “Ok, enough bra-gging.”