One in eight American women will develop invasive breast cancer in her life, according to BreastCancer.org.
That's a startling statistic, and it's part of the reason that so many women are trained early to do self exams of their breasts.
There's just one problem: We all know how to sweep our breasts to check for lumps, but until you actually have a tumor or a lump, you don't really know what you're feeling for.
Enter a genius new awareness campaign called "Know Your Lemons."
The centerpiece is a photo of 12 lemons in an egg carton. Each lemon looks a little different, and that's because each lemon represents a different way that cancer might manifest itself.
Most importantly, it doesn't just show you what cancer looks like, it gives you a relatable model that everyone understands — a lemon — and uses it to show how a lump or bump might feel to your hand during a self exam.
Scroll through to learn more.
Here's the post that started it all: A cancer patient named Erin Smith Chieze decided to communicate what your breasts really feel like when something potentially dangerous is going on.
She was sick of campaigns that raised awareness without communicating the truth.
She wrote:
Someone once posted a picture on Facebook of what breast cancer can look like. Not feel, but look like.
In December of 2015 when I saw an indentation that looked like one of those pictures, I instantly knew I had breast cancer.
I tried to feel for a tumor, but my tumor was non palpable. I was diagnosed with breast cancer 5 days later and with stage 4 the following month.
A heart did nothing for awareness. I knew what breast cancer was. I knew all about self exams, but a picture of what to look for keyed me into knowing I had a terminal disease.
We need to give REAL information, not cute hearts.
Without having seen a picture randomly with real information, I wouldn't have known what to look for.
Do us a favor, stop playing games with my life and start truly helping people. Metastatic breast cancer treatment research and real awareness.
She went on to explain that this picture of 12 lemons in an egg carton is very similar to the one that helped her diagnose her own cancer, because it shows off different shapes and lumps that you might be able to feel in your own breasts.
Unlike exam tutorials, which just teach you to look for lumps, this teaches you what lumps might actually feel like.
For example, they show you the difference between feeling a "thick mass," an "indentation," and a "hidden lump"
The words alone don't mean that much to most of us, but in the picture you can see the difference on each lemon, and easily imagine how it would feel on your own breast.
In the past week, the idea to make breast exams more relatable with lemons has broken the internet.
The Know Your Lemons campaign told LittleThings that, after Erin's post took off, their two sites briefly crashed from the number of people going online to learn more about the campaign.
Now they're back up and running at their websites Worldwide Breast Cancer and Know Your Lemons.
The simple, brilliant image is the brainchild of Corinne Ellsworth Beaumont, a designer who shares in her online bio that she lost both of her grandmothers to breast cancer.
While she was studying design, she started thinking about ways to convey the feel and texture of a breast abnormality.
She felt (and she's right!) that most of the pictures you see don't really help you understand what it feels like.
With lots of hard work, Beaumont's passion project became an international campaign to teach women how to check for lumps and bumps.
However, it didn't really take off until Erin decided to raise awareness in a really tangible way.
She was fed up with campaigns that simply told women to support breast cancer research without giving them concrete steps.
Most importantly, this photo can be shared widely without running into any obstacles.
Illustrations of breast exams, including our own, above, often have to be censored online due to nudity prohibitions.
The beauty of the lemons is that they show you exactly what a breast looks like, without showing any nudity at all! It's so simple and so brilliant.
So, in that spirit, make sure you join in and SHARE this photo with every woman you know. You just might save her life one day.
