Awareness Bracelets: A Fashion Statement or Social Awareness Creating Bracelet Par Excellence?

The humble silicone rubber bracelets that found a pride of place on your dressing table and on your wrists, which served as an inexpensive mode of dressing up your outfit and which you and your friends bought in dozens in every color imaginable, have now metamorphosed into something bigger, better and more useful – Awareness bracelets.

Yes, you heard that right. This is the name currently in use for those sweet little pieces of fashion accessory that have ceased to be just some other trendy pieces! Of course, these silicone rubber bracelets are still all the rage, they still sport different colors borrowed from the rainbow, they are still available in a riot of colors, in different designs and patterns and yes, they are still trendy.

But they are now being used to spread awareness about social issues such as cancer or hepatitis or AIDS or swine flu or other such diseases or issues.

These silicone rubber bracelets are essentially jelly-like thin silicone bracelets or wristbands and are manufactured out of industrial silicone, as you have already guessed. Silicone is a cheap rubbery flexible material and the Awareness bracelets made of this substance are favorite pop picks amongst early teen groups and middle school or high schoolers.

But of course, nowadays it is the adults who are wearing them to espouse one charity cause or another and every day you will find at least a dozen celebrities wearing some kind of Awareness bracelets or other in support of the non profit organization or charity organization with which they are attached or which they own. Of course these people are not really making a fashion statement; rather they are keener on spreading awareness about the social cause they are supporting.

When you wear the Awareness bracelets, you are seen as a socially responsible citizen and these charitable trusts mint millions by selling these Awareness bracelets. The fund that is raised through the sale of Awareness bracelets globally is used to support the cause of that non profit organization.

The money is used to help patients of various kinds of diseases, to offer rehabilitation to people who have been outcast from mainstream society or to fund the education and growing up of orphans or whatever it is that they are supporting.

Sometimes these Awareness bracelets are worn to create consciousness about environmental damage and pollution or to create awareness about the destruction that wars cause to life and property or to raise funds to rehabilitate victims of natural catastrophe like earthquakes or tsunamis or floods or famines or landslides or volcanoes or about global catastrophes like global warming. That is why people treat Awareness bracelets with respect.