Pinktober is here. All hail badly tinted food , food products, booze, you name it.  Heck even  Manolo Blahnik has designed special pink shoes – I cannot make this stuff up click here.  I will no longer drool over Manolos. I am just that offended they are pandering to pink marketing.

I find a lot of #Pinktober in reality to be offensive.  The Manolos are offensive excess and if you are shoe aficionado, wow talk about re-treads on design.  They aren’t even so special for what they cost. Just expensive. There are also  Pink Wheat Thins boxes, pink KFC containers, HardRock Café marketing stunts, pink booze bottles, and lest we all forget pink rubber bracelets.

And that is but the tip of the pink iceberg. Umbrellas, tacky plastic cups, nail polish, re-packaged pink lipstick, more t-shirts than you can stock a cotton mill with – if a manufacturer or business can think it up, they sell it. In pink.

I forgot to mention designer Marc Jacobs? He is regurgitating a perfume and now it will be Daisy “Hot Pink” . It costs $79.00 and $3.00 off each bottle (or basically nothing) will be donated to charity. “Net” not gross proceeds.

And people snap up these products thinking that they are doing a world of good and donating money to the cause and in reality? You are lucky if 20% of every purchase actually goes towards breast cancer research or charities.  And if you purchase the items on SALE after #Pinktober? HA! More likely than not no charity will ever see a cent of your purchase.

I don’t hate women. I am a breast cancer survivor.  But I do not need to buy pink crap to help define me.  I hate people trying to take advantage of how other people feel about a disease to boost their bottom lines in the last quarter of the year.

If you are feeling pinktriotic (what else do you call it?), make a donation directly to a breast cancer charity you believe in.

Personally I recommend thoroughly checking a charity out first.  Guidestar can help, Googling about them can help.  Komen I was done with when they played games a couple years back but I still love Living Beyond Breast Cancer and breastcancer.org .

Buying a box of Wheat Thins colored pink for October , or buying Marc Jacobs re-branded perfume, or spending close to $1000 on a pair of pink Manolos is not going do anything real for breast cancer.  But supporting actual charities and legitimate research will.

Pink diatribe over.