Make it a hype-free holiday!

Dudes.. It's christmas... My family is here... and I'm gonna take a few days off from blogging.

Stay well, and have a hype-free holiday one and all!

Audrey

Comments

[Kelly]

Merry Christmas Audrey! Hope you have a relaxing one! :)

[AJ]

Off-post comment. Have you seen the Bristol-Myers Squibb ad re: Sharon Blynn's Bald is Beautiful organization. Noble goal. I need to look into it. I was struck by the fact that an ad trying to get people to deal with the realities of cancer (of disease, of life) shows a beautiful woman, albeit bald, who is otherwise just as made up, air-brushed, olucked, etc. As any other magazine model. Mind you, I am not offended by it. I just thought it might be more powerful a message without the standard mock-up. What do you think?

[sharon blynn]

hi there!

it's me, sharon -- the bald is beautiful gal in the bristol-myers commercial. thank you for posting your comment. i am a real-life ovarian cancer survivor and personally very proud to have been a part of their campaign. if i may say so, this campaign is no "standard mock-up" -- quite the opposite, and at the core of the very reason i agreed to do it! it was actually something very "radical" and UNstandard for the approach/tone advertisers usually take. for what felt like the first time ever, a company decided to obliterate the myth that advertising/marketing means you have to make people feel incomplete or bad about themselves in order to promote a product. and nowhere in the spots are we promoting any product, actually. what makes it even more beautiful (to me anyway) is that these spots (four of them -- myself, lynn redgrave, lance armstrong, maria davis) stand on their own as powerful messages of positivity, hope, encouragement, inspiration.

and yes, there is make-up and lighting (i do my own eyebrow plucking, thank you) -- as opposed to making us look sickly and knocking-on-heaven's-door and grey-pallored skintone looking miserable, we were presented as the radiant, joyful, strong survivors, as i am and was during my treatments, and also speak the message "love yourself" visually and verbally (my script was derived from their initial interview with me about my cancer journey and my bald is beautiful organization). it flips the script on how we depict and perceive cancer, and it has had a very positive impact on many people (at least i know that from those who have written to me to tell me so!). if i may add, i encourage you to shift the language a bit: instead of beautiful ALBEIT BALD -- i'm bald AND beautiful, beautiful AS bald, as are many women who have no hair from chemo or from alopecia or other health challenges.

just puttin' that idea further out there in the stratosphere. thank you for your posting and the opportunity to share these ideas with whomever may come across it. and feel free to visit my website at www.baldisbeautiful.org anytime! wishing you peace, joy, love, light. ciao 4 now.

peace.
-sb
www.baldisbeautiful.org

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