Why is Everyone Posting Colors on Their Facebook Status Updates?

I, like many other Facebook users, was very confused today when I logged into my Facebook account and viewed my Facebook wall. Many of my female friends had posted strange one word Facebook status updates. All of the strange Facebook updates were the names of various colors.

The first strange Facebook update I saw said: white. I initially chalked it up to the snow that many of us have been getting and figured my friends were updating their Facebook status with the one color they could see when they looked outside. But then I began seeing colors such as black, purple and amusingly lemon yellow.

Then the strangest Facebook status update I saw was from a friend who apologized for having no colors to share with us. Intrigued by this, I made a Facebook update of my own asking my friends to enlighten me. I soon received several copies of the following email:

"Some fun is going on...just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men...it will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it will take before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status...haha!"

It turns out that someone decided that a bra color Facebook status update campaign would be a great way to harness the social networking power of Facebook to raise awareness of breast cancer. It certainly appears to be working since so many Facebook users, both the deliberately uninformed males and the women like me who just didn't get caught up in the viral Facebook effort are intrigued by the Facebook color status updates.

The Facebook bra color status update effort was started to use Facebook to raise awareness of breast cancer. However, the Facebook bra color status update effort may end up being even more successful than the originator intended. Many female Facebook users who are posting their bra color on their Facebook status are also taking a few minutes to perform breast self-examinations to detect any lumps that could be signs of breast cancer.

The American Cancer Society recommends that all women perform a breast self-examination every month. However, many women forget to perform this simple but potentially life saving procedure. With a large portion of Facebook's millions of users participating in this campaign, social networking may just end up saving lives.

So ladies, if you are game log in to Facebook and update your status with your bra color. If you think that sharing your bra color is parting with too much information, by all means do not do it. However, please take a few minutes to perform a breast self-examination and tell all your female friends to do the same.