No make-up selfie craze brings UK cancer charity HK$25m windfall
Cancer Research UK rakes in HK$25 million as social media users post photos of themselves with no make-up in trend triggered by Oscars row
It started with a row at the Oscars, featured the current obsession with "selfies" and rapidly clogged up legions of Facebook streams.
Tens of thousands of women, egged on by their friends, shared pictures of themselves without make-up to raise awareness of breast cancer.
By Friday, the viral trend had transformed into a fundraising phenomenon, generating a £2 million (HK$25.6 million) windfall for Cancer Research UK.
The #nomakeupselfies campaign raised the money in just 48 hours, with hundreds of thousands of donations from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter users sharing photos of themselves without make-up and then nominating a friend to do the same.
Cancer Research UK said it had not initiated this particular campaign, but was alerted to the #nomakeupselfies trend on Tuesday and began to ask users to add a donation request and text code to their posts.
The charity's head of social media, Aaron Eccles, said: "We're over the moon. When we do a social media campaign we want to engage as many people as possible. This has taken off like crazy." The trend appears to have started last week when American crime author Laura Lippman tweeted a picture of herself without make-up in support of Kim Novak, the 81-year-old actress whose looks - apparently affected by plastic surgery - were criticised at the Oscars.
The theme was picked up by celebrities and fans of Lippman before spreading more widely.
