Bra Status Updates

About

Bra Status Updates is an online survey game that spread through Facebook in early January 2010 via private messages among female Facebook users. It was done under the guise of breast cancer awareness.

Origin

The origin of the message is unclear, but one of the earliest mentions of the copypasta dates back to December 29, 2009 on Yahoo! Answers Canada.^[1] In this instance, there was no mention of breast cancer, the message was simply intended to confuse a user’s male friends.

right girls let’s have some fun. write the color of the bra you’re wearing right now as your status on fb and dont tell the boys. they will be wondering what all the girls are doing with colors as their status. forward this to all the girls online

Spread

By the evening of January 6th, 2011, the message had spread to the US and France, now often including the line “spreading the wings of cancer awareness.” On that day, the messages were shared on the CafeMom^[2] and Babycenter^[3] forums. Both of these threads were posted by users who had seen other people on their friends list doing it first.

Similar to chain letters, the text of the messages evolved as they spread.

“We are playing a game…… silly, but fun! Write the color of your bra as your status, just the color & texture, nothing else!! Copy this and pass it on to all girls/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 color as their status!! Let’s have fun!!
Pass this on LADIES”

“List the color of your bra in your FB status, just the color, nothing more. Then send this mssg to your girlfriends’ inboxes, too … no men.
The point is to see how far we can spread breast cancer awareness … and make the men wonder what’s up :) "

News of the trend started appearing outside of Facebook by January 7th, on sites like Mashable^[4], Urlesque^[5], Associated Content^[6], and the NY Daily News.^[7] All of the articles touched upon the fact that, though the status messages were loosely tied to breast cancer awareness, there was no direct tie to an organization or group.

Over the next two days, the story spread further to the Huffington Post^[8], ABC News^[9], MSNBC^[10], Telegraph^[11], and Jezebel^[12]. On the 8th, “color status on Facebook” ranked #11 on Google Trends.^[9] The articles note that, while most of the posts were being made by women, many men were trolling by posting colors to their statuses as well.

While the status updates were not fueled by any particular group, the Susan J. Komen Foundation saw their Facebook likes grow from 135 to 135,000 on January 8th, 2011.^[13]

On Twitter

Since many users crosspost their Facebook statuses to Twitter, the fad grew on there as well. While searching for tweets would include much more than just the ones pertaining to this specific message, there was a large boost in tweets about bras observed on Trendistic, possibly from people discussing what was happening.

Derivatives

Similar to the way Bill Gates / Microsoft Chain Letter e-mails evolved into new messages from different companies over time, so did the Facebook status trend. This included shoe sizes the same month^[14] and places users keep their handbags, which began as early as March^[15] but didn’t see news coverage until October 2010.^[16]

Search Interest

Search peaked for bra status updates in January 2010, and fell into relative obscurity until October of that year -- Breast Cancer Awareness month.

External References