Tens of thousands of women, egged on by their friends, shared pictures of themselves without makeup to raise awareness of breast cancer.
By March 21, the viral trend had transformed into a fundraising phenomenon, generating a GBP2m (Rs. 200 million) windfall for Cancer Research UK.
The #nomakeupselfies campaign raised the money in just 48 hours, the charity said, with hundreds of thousands of donations from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter users sharing pictures of themselves without makeup and 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. Since then, the money has flooded into the UK charity.
Twitter said the hashtag started to gather steam on Tuesday and peaked on Thursday, with 83,000 mentions since Wednesday alone. Instagram saw 59,000 posts in 24 hours from Thursday to Friday, and estimated those users would have donated GBP180,000.
