In the past few years, breast cancer awareness has exploded into our social peripheries and now ranks in the pantheon of social causes with the likes of global warming and the War on Terror. Originally championed in the 1970s by First Lady Betty Ford, who underwent a mastectomy, breast cancer today extends even into the reaches of the NFL, where certain games are dedicated to the cause and players this season can be seen donning hot pink cleats and sweatbands.

It's easy to get swept up in the hype for searching for the cure, but when the word "pink" begins having just as much social impact as "going green," many people start to wonder where the line of finding a cure ends and plain social cause marketing begins.

It's an odd phenomena, the idea of "going pink," because breast cancer, like any other potentially fatal illness is, at the end of the day, quite a personal matter. And while there are many phenomenally strong and publicly proud breast cancer survivors out there, there are many who are still privately trying to come to terms with something that left them physically and emotionally scarred.

My aunt, who underwent a mastectomy to treat breast cancer in 2005 and then recently underwent a second one to treat a recurrence, said she didn't feel comfortable participating in breast cancer awareness events because "I don't feel yet like it's even really something I had."

It's easy for companies to develop pink products and donate profits for research, but the question then arises: Where does this money go exactly? With all this hype, are we actually closer to finding a cure? After all, breast cancer marketing offers companies an easy bandwagon to jump on, and buying "pink" is something that has indeed become very en vogue.

At the end of the day, I don't have the answers to these questions, and I don't doubt that much of the finances generated by "going pink" have helped pave the way for at least more social acceptance of the disease. If anything, the pink campaign has given survivors who want it an open platform to discuss a disease that was once considered taboo.

It's easy to get swept up in the hype of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but the fact that this exists also begs us to look beyond wearing pink ribbons and buying hot pink laptops. Much like the "green" campaign, such social tidal waves that become brands almost in and of themselves ask us to look beneath the material surface into other ways we can recognize problems and discuss them in a meaningful way.

As social causes become marketing brands, we risk not only diluting the solutions for the problems we are trying to fix (after all, buying organic food will help the environment, but even the regulations for these have become so convoluted and the organic industry so large, it's now guilty of many of the faults and carbon footprints it originally stood against).

I'm in no way criticizing what hard-won victories many of the champions of the pink movement have accomplished. But while such campaigns raise awareness, it's important to not forget how exactly your pink dollars are helping the cause and the root of the movement, which is not complicated make-up campaigns or large benefit walks or glossy Cosmo covers or guitars autographed by Melissa Ethridge. It's cancer. In all forms. It's the private moments between the individual people and their families. It's the late-night phone calls. Because in the end, breast cancer is like any other disease. And we're still a long way from finding a cure.

Lara Gabrielle Blanco Heintz