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Strong. Beautiful. Healthy. Empowered.


Lezlee Westine
President & CEO, Personal Care Products Council

As Breast Cancer Awareness Month comes to a close, we continue our commitment to raise public consciousness and support the 1 in 8 women in the United States who are affected by this relentless disease. We honor the incredible strength of survivors, and remember those we have lost.

Over the course of several decades, beauty and personal care companies have played a leading role in breast cancer awareness, research, detection, and treatment. Our member companies’ long-standing commitments include, but are not limited to:

The collective efforts of our industry, likeminded sectors, and women and breast cancer focused organizations have led to unparalleled advances in prevention, diagnosis, treatment and survivorship. The result? A significant increase in survival rates over the past several decades.

We see a lot of pink in October. Pink ribbons, pink t-shirts, pink-themed events, and pink product promotions, all of which provide an important opportunity to raise awareness and funds for research and support. While pink is engaging and fun, the color is – more importantly – meaningful. Women today are  empowered with information and education about breast cancer, and effectively advocating for their own breast health. The iconic pink ribbon – which was first introduced in 1992 by the late Evelyn Lauder, daughter-in-law of beauty industry icon Estée Lauder, and longtime executive of The Estée Lauder Companies, with her friend Alexandra Penney, former editor-in-chief of SELF Magazine – helped shape the current environment in which awareness, uninhibited communication (once strictly taboo), self-breast exams, and mammograms are commonplace.

For the past 30 years, the entire beauty and personal care industry – manufacturers, suppliers, packagers, professional services, retailers, creative agencies, and beauty media – has proudly supported Look Good Feel Better. This unique public service program helps individuals with cancer improve their self-esteem and confidence by addressing the appearance-related side effects of treatment. The program offers free workshops, virtual classes, and online support that include lessons on skin and nail care; makeup application; wig and turban tutorials; and overall styling advice. Each year, PCPC members donate $2 million in funding, and more than one million products (valued at $10 million) to be used in these hands-on workshops. To date, the program has positively impacted the lives of more than two million women worldwide diagnosed with cancer. In the U.S., more than half of the women served are breast cancer patients.

As an organization that represents an industry fully committed to the health and well-being of women, we will continue to advocate for access to preventative care, screenings that help detect cancer early, affordable life-saving treatment, and research that could lead to the eradication of breast cancer once and for all.

 

For more information about Look Good Feel Better and our member company social impact programs that support breast cancer, please visit our website.

Sources

  1. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics
  2. https://www.reducerecurrence.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=DSE%20-%20NB%20-

Proud to be Part of a Movement


Louanne Roark
Executive Director, Look Good Feel Better

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While it has become a familiar part of our lives, it wasn’t always that way. Launched in 1985, the annual campaign set out to promote awareness and support for women with breast cancer while championing access to prevention strategies, including mammography, at a time when people simply didn’t talk about breast cancer. Thirty-four years later, you would be hard-pressed to find an adult woman who had not been exposed to – and thus benefited from – this important effort.

I am proud to say that the cosmetics and personal care industry was a leader in the breast cancer awareness movement almost from the beginning. Thirty years ago, the industry launched a ground-breaking program, Look Good Feel Better. It was the first organized, charitable program to assist female cancer patients – free of charge – with appearance side effects from cancer treatment. From our start in 1989, we quickly learned that in addition to improving appearance and body image, Look Good Feel Better also improved morale, confidence, hope, and provided a vision of the light at the end of the treatment tunnel.

Today, we take for granted that companies engage in Corporate Social Responsibility. But 30 years ago, it was just taking root as a concept. Little did we know at the time that we were at the forefront of this sweeping change in corporate and consumer mindset, and that we were starting something very special. Dare I say, we were starting a movement?

Look Good Feel Better has proven to be a bold demonstration of the good that can happen when industry unites behind a larger purpose. The personal care industry and beauty professionals across the country generously donate millions of dollars’ worth of beauty products and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours to women undergoing cancer treatment, restoring confidence and boosting self-esteem. It has come to represent our industry at its best and exemplifies what our products can do to support wellbeing.

Since those early days, more than 2 million people in 27 countries around the world have experienced the personal and transformative power of our industry’s products to reignite their self-confidence in the midst of their most challenging moments.

And it works. We know from research that the program helps women face cancer with confidence – 96% say the program improved their self-image and 98% would recommend it to other women with cancer.

We have been building this movement for 30 years but, in some ways, we are just getting started.

Today, we are stretching to reach a bold and ambitious future. Look Good Feel Better now offers free support for cancer patients through live, hospital-based group workshops; new virtual livestreaming programs; through community partnerships such as our collaboration with Walgreens; and by offering robust online education and support. We are delivering the Look Good Feel Better message and expertise when and where the information is needed, thereby reaching and serving more women in need.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a time to rededicate our efforts toward prevention, education, patient and survivor support and, ultimately, finding a cure for this cruel disease that strikes 1 in 8 women in their lifetime. In fact, more than half (60%) of the women Look Good Feel Better serves are breast cancer patients and nearly a third of new cancer diagnoses among women in 2019 are expected to be breast cancer diagnoses. We are helping women at a critical time, in a real and tangible way, to find their way through and beyond breast cancer.

I am proud of what we have accomplished in the past 30 years, and honored to have been a part of it. And I am energized knowing that Look Good Feel Better is well-positioned to be a powerful resource for the next 30 years.

So, before October comes to an end, let’s celebrate how far we’ve come – and together, commit ourselves to the future of Look Good Feel Better and the people we serve.