Pink in October, Phthalates All Year
Every October, someone will ask you to buy something pink. A shampoo. A yogurt. A candle. A bucket of chicken. Part of the price goes to the fight against breast cancer, and the ribbon on the label tells you whose side the company is on.
Nobody will ask what is inside the bottle.
Last October I opened a talk with a photograph of a man in a suit. Under the photo I wrote his profile: male, white, 70 kilos, 25 to 40 years old, stable hormones, no chance of pregnancy. Medicine calls him the reference patient. Drugs, devices and safety limits were built around his body. The women in that room had spent their whole lives being measured against him.
Forty-one Octobers
What Pink October is
If you have never heard of Pink October, here is the short version. Every October, charities, hospitals, brands and governments turn things pink.
The message to women is simple: get screened for breast cancer, and give money to fight it.
The month started in the United States in October 1985.
Its founders were the American Cancer Society and the pharmaceutical arm of Imperial Chemical Industries, at the time one of the largest chemical companies in the world. That arm later became part of AstraZeneca, a major seller of breast cancer drugs.
From day one, the goal was to promote mammography. The ribbon came seven years later.
In 1992, Evelyn Lauder of Estée Lauder and Alexandra Penney, editor of Self magazine, handed out 1.5 million pink ribbons in Estée Lauder stores across New York [1]. By the end of the decade, the movement was global.
A chemical company helped start the month. A cosmetics company gave it its colour. Keep both facts in mind for the rest of this article.
So what did 41 years of pink buy?
Real progress on one number. In high-income countries, 83% of women diagnosed with breast cancer survive. In low-income countries, more than half of the women diagnosed die from it. [3]
Belgium is one of seven countries meeting the WHO target of a 2.5% drop in breast cancer deaths every year. Screening saves lives. At the same time, globally, 2.3 million women were diagnosed in 2022 and 670,000 died. In half of the countries examined, the rate of new cases rose by 1 to 5% a year. By 2050, new cases are projected to climb by 38% and deaths by 68%.
Screening finds the cancer. It does nothing to stop the cancer from starting.To prevent cancer from happening , you need to do prevention.
Larousse defines prevention as the set of measures taken to prevent a danger, a risk or a harm, and the organisation in charge of putting those measures in place.
That gives two halves: the measures, and someone answerable for them.
Now the official kit.
The European Code Against Cancer, 5th edition, published in October 2025 "14 ways you can help prevent cancer".[5]
Every recommendation incriminates you.
Do not smoke. Avoid alcohol. Breastfeed your baby. Take part in screening. At work, inform yourself about cancer-causing factors and ask your employer to protect you. Against air pollution, take public transport.
The chemicals in your shampoo, your cosmetics and your food packaging appear in none of the fourteen.
To be fair, this edition adds 14 recommendations for policy-makers, a first in the code's history. They cover tobacco taxes, alcohol prices, air quality limits and industrial emissions. Consumer product chemistry is missing there too. Industry appears once, as a risk to manage: governments are asked to protect the recommendations against undue industry interference.
So the Larousse definition is half met. The measures exist. The organisation in charge of them turns out to be the woman herself, with fourteen tasks on her list, while the companies that formulate what she puts on her skin have none.
In 2010, Barbara Brenner, then head of the watchdog group Breast Cancer Action [6], said in public that the world did not need any more awareness. Sixteen Octobers later, awareness is the one thing Pink October produces in surplus.
Read the ribbon as a business model
The parallel
Let's forget that Pink October is about cancer awareness, and let's see it as a simple business model.
A company sells more of its product in October. A slice of each sale goes to a charity. The more it sells, the more it gives, and the better it looks.
Revenue, donation and reputation all grow with volume.
In most European countries, the tax office then gives back part of the gift. The gesture is generous, deductible and photogenic.
Now look at what stays the same: the product, the formula, the supplier and the volume.
Philanthropy is kindness with a tax receipt.
A CSR strategy works on the business model itself. It changes how the company earns its money and who pays when the product causes harm. A company that gives 50 cents per pink bucket has a charity budget. A company paid for the result instead of the volume has a strategy.
Since 2004, the UN Industrial Development Organization has promoted a different model, called Chemical Leasing. The supplier stops selling tonnes. It sells the function the chemical performs: parts cleaned, surfaces coated, kilos of laundry washed. The customer pays for the result, and every extra litre of chemical becomes a cost for the supplier instead of revenue. The supplier now has a direct reason to use less, and to know exactly what it puts in.
In our previous article [7], we showed how Signify, Michelin and Rolls-Royce sell light, kilometres and flying hours, so the seller pays for every unit that fails.
Pink October works the other way round. The seller earns goodwill on every unit sold. If anything inside the product causes harm, the bill reaches the woman and her health system years later, long after the ribbon is in the bin.
Hold those two models side by side. One rewards selling more. The other rewards needing less.
Let see now what that means, pillar by pillar.
The ribbon goes on the outside
ENVIRONMENT
Companies report carbon. Tonnes of CO2, scope 1, scope 2, a reduction target for 2030. The chemistry of what they sell gets a paragraph, if it gets one at all.
Start with a word most consumers never learned: endocrine disruptor. Your body runs on hormones. A hormone is a chemical message that tells a cell what to do. An endocrine disruptor is a substance that interferes with that message. It copies the hormone, it blocks the hormone, or it scrambles the signal. Breast cancer is often hormone-driven. You see where this goes.
The cost of these chemicals is no secret. In 2016, a team led by Leonardo Trasande [8] calculated that exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals costs the European Union a median of €163 billion a year, 1.28% of EU GDP. Divide by 365 and you get approximately €447 million a day. The authors priced only the chemicals with the strongest evidence and said a wider analysis would push the bill higher.
Read the list of diseases they put a price on. IQ loss, autism, ADHD, endometriosis, fibroids, obesity, diabetes, undescended testicles, male infertility, and deaths linked to low testosterone. Breast cancer is not on it.
The most quoted euro figure on endocrine disruptors leaves out the disease Pink October was built for. So the real bill is higher than €163 billion. How much higher? We do not know.
Let's talk about Phtalates.
Phthalates are chemicals that make plastic soft and help fragrances last. The link between phthalates and breast cancer is not settled. Studies disagree. Some find nothing. Hold that thought.
A Danish study followed 1.12 million women over almost 10 million woman-years. Most phthalate exposures showed no link to breast cancer. Women with high cumulative exposure to one phthalate, dibutyl phthalate, through medicines formulated with it, had approximately double the rate of hormone-sensitive breast cancer. Lower doses showed no link.[9]
One line in the funding section deserves a second look: part of the money for that study came from Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Remember the name.
A narrow finding. Also the exact kind of finding a risk committee exists to price. A board that waits for certainty on a chemical in its product line is a board that has decided to let a regulator set the timing.
Brussels already set it.
On 31 March 2023, the European Commission published a regulation that created new hazard classes for endocrine disruptors under the EU rules on classification and labelling, known as CLP. [10]
Substances already on the market must be classified under the new rules by 1 November 2026. Mixtures already on the market follow by 1 May 2028 (Dutch Board for the Authorisation of Plant Protection Products and Biocides). Count from April 2023 to October 2026 and industry had approximately 43 months of notice.
Forty-three months. How many board meetings is that? How many of them had "endocrine disruptors" on the agenda?
Go back to the two business models. A company that sells volume buys ingredients on price and asks the supplier for a safety data sheet. A supplier paid for the function carries the cost of every gram it adds, so it has every reason to know what each gram does. One model reads the hazard data at the deadline. The other reads it at the design stage.
Take your best-selling product and print its list of ingredients. For each ingredient, write down two things: who checked whether it disrupts hormones under the new EU rules, and on what date. If you leave both blanks empty, your company has no idea whether that product will need a new formula after 1 November. A pink ribbon on a product you never checked costs you nothing in October, but it may cost you a reformulation, new labels and your reputation later.The threshold was built for someone else
SOCIAL
Go back to the man in the suit.
In 1977, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a guideline that kept most women of childbearing age out of early clinical research. The FDA formally reversed it in 1993.[11]
Sixteen years. Many drugs approved before the early 1990s, some still prescribed today, were tested in trials where women were missing or barely present.[12]
The reference patient did not stay in the pharmacy. He moved into the medical devices too.
During the pandemic, doctors relied on pulse oximeters, the small clip on your finger that reads the oxygen in your blood. In December 2020, researchers at the University of Michigan compared those readings with blood tests. When the clip showed a healthy 92 to 96%, the blood test showed dangerously low oxygen in 11.7% of readings from Black patients, against 3.6% from white patients.[13]
The gap is approximately 3.2 times.
The device worked. It worked for the body it was calibrated on.
Chemical safety follows the same logic.
A safety limit tells you how much of a substance a body tolerates. Which body?
The phthalate research hints at the answer. In a US study of five ethnic groups, the risk of breast cancer among Native Hawaiian women rose with exposure to eight of ten phthalates measured. The only earlier study of its kind had found nothing, in a group of mostly white women.[14]
Missing data does not mean missing risk. It means nobody looked.
Here the business model matters again. A model that sells volume needs one average customer, and the average customer looks a lot like the man in the suit. A model paid for results has to deliver for every customer it serves, including the ones furthest from the average. Those customers are where the failures show up first, and where the seller pays first.
My position is simple. Set the threshold on the most exposed body, and every other body is protected by default. Set it on the reference patient, and the people least like him carry the risk without ever being told.
Whose body set the safety limit for the product you sell? Do you know? Does your supplier know?The person who made the promise pays
GOVERNANCE
In April 2010, KFC turned its buckets pink. [15]
For every pink bucket, restaurant operators donated 50 cents to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The campaign raised $4.2 million. At 50 cents a bucket, that is approximately 8.4 million buckets of chicken (4,200,000 ÷ 0.50).
Breast Cancer Action called it pink washing, a term the group coined for companies that wrap themselves in the ribbon while selling products linked to the disease.[16]
KFC answered that its ads featured the grilled chicken.
One part of the money paid for research on what women are exposed to. Another part came from a bucket nobody audited. That bucket is the volume model in its purest form. The donation grew with every bucket sold. Nothing in the contract asked what was in the bucket.
CSRD now applies only to companies with more than 1,000 employees and more than €450 million in turnover. Approximately 90% of the companies previously covered are now out [17].
Most of the companies I work with earn between €50 million and €500 million a year. Under €450 million, the reporting duty is gone. Fewer reports. Fewer questions. Fewer pages where a phthalate would ever appear.
Now the irony. The duty to report shrank in February. The duty to classify grows on 1 November. Two different teams own those two duties. The sustainability team writes the report. Regulatory affairs reads the supplier's safety data sheet. Which document does your board read?
A product as a service-based contract answers that question without a committee. The party that chose the ingredient is the party that pays when the ingredient becomes a problem. No report cycle sits between the decision and the bill.
Run the math.
Profit equals revenue minus cost. A pink campaign books revenue in October. A forced reformulation books cost later, on a deadline written in Brussels in 2023. The marketing team takes credit for the first number. Who takes the second?
Climate has its own version. A company publishes a carbon target, plants trees, and buys offsets, while its product line stays the same. Same logic, different colour.
Governance exists to close that gap. In ESG language, governance means board committees, audits, disclosure rules, and sustainability reports. All of that machinery has one job: force someone to answer for a risk they created.
So look at what happened to the machinery this year.
In February 2026, the EU approved the Omnibus package. Mandatory sustainability reporting under
Two numbers belong on your next board agenda. The revenue from your pink campaign this month. The cost of replacing every ingredient in that pink product that meets the new endocrine disruptor criteria. If the second number does not exist yet, your C-suite/ board has approved a campaign without knowing what it is selling.
Who on your C-suite/Board signed off on the pink packaging? Who signed off on the formula inside it? Is it the same person?Detection is a budget line. Prevention is a design choice.
Pink October and recycling share a business model.
Both clean up after the product. Neither touches the product.
Recycling sorts the waste after the sale.
Screening finds the tumour after the exposure.
Both deserve funding. Neither one changes what goes into the bottle.
Pink October asks women to check their bodies. Fair enough. Checking works.
A campaign that only asks the patient to act leaves the product off the hook.
The woman gets the mammogram. The bottle gets the ribbon.
As a physical chemist, I read the label before I read the slogan. Earlier I asked you to keep the mixed evidence on phthalates in mind. Here is why. Mixed evidence is the normal state of chemical risk, and Brussels has stopped waiting for it to clear. The new CLP rules include a category called "suspected endocrine disruptors for human health," created for exactly this situation [18].
A board that hides behind "the science is not settled" will find that the regulation already has a box for unsettled science. The companies that get ahead of it will be the ones whose boards stopped asking "are we sure it causes harm?" and started asking "what will it cost us when the classification says it might?"
Forty-one years of awareness taught women to check their bodies. A contract that makes the seller pay for what it puts in teaches the seller to check its formula. Pink October ends on 31 October. The EU Classification, Labelling and Packaging deadline for substances already on the market falls on 1 November 2026.[2] Gayle A. Sulik, Pink Ribbon Blues : How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women's Health, 424 pages, published 28 October 2010.
[12] https://www.medidata.com/en/life-science-resources/medidata-blog/women-in-clinical-trials-history/
[15] https://www.qsrweb.com/news/kfc-campaign-raises-more-than-4-million-for-breast-cancer-research/
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