So I’m not some kind of animal here to argue with the idea that there are women out there who need to be more regularly screened for cervical cancer. These statistics are from England, but so is the related bullshit (at least so far, but it threatens to spread!). At any rate, here are the numbers: in England, about a million women are delayed on their pap smears, and cervical cancer is increasing in women under 35.
I myself am very good about this. I might not GET A PAP SMEAR every fifteen minutes like some doctors recommend (in addition to some people never getting pap smears apparently others are getting too many) but yeah. Important. Now let’s get to the fun part where we watch people go to great lengths to debase themselves in the name of “a good cause” or, women taking selfies with smeared lipstick to remind other women to get pap smears.
Via Elle:
The always-gorgeous Georgia May Jagger had us doing a double-take this morning when she appeared on Instagram with her lipstick smudged quite out of place. It turns out, however, that this was no makeup faux pas—in fact, you might be seeing a lot more smeared lippy on your social media feeds over the next several days.
[T]his snap is part of a new social media campaign with U.K.-based Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust called #SmearForSmear—which, much like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and the #FeelingNuts campaign for prostate cancer—is part of an important cause. Jo’s created the campaign to encourage women to get regular Pap smears, which are far and away the easiest way to prevent cervical cancer—and yet, as Jo’s chief executive, Robert Music, noted in a statement to ELLE.com, fewer women are getting screened each year. “If we can just save one life with this campaign, then we have achieved a great deal,” he said.
Jagger nominated Suki Waterhouse, Cara Delevingne and @jasminebydesign to be the next women to take the incredibly brave and cool step of going #SmearForSmear.
A smear of lipstick. A pap smear. A smear of lipstick. A pap smear.
(I love saying them over and over together like that: it reminds me, in both spirit and tone, of a photo in my college yearbook of a classmate of mine standing next to her father, who had GRADUATED FROM THE SAME COLLEGE, in which they were both wearing their mortarboards and beaming with what I though seemed rather excessive pride, and underneath them a caption proclaimed “GRAND GRAD GRAD DAD” a phrase I found so winning I said nothing else for nearly a month.)