Just as red ribbons are associated with AIDS, Mabel Lam (left) and Lizzy Karp hope that lace will remind young women not to forget about getting a Pap test.

Young women love lace, or so it appears, as Lizzy Karp and Mabel Lam eagerly pull reams of this fabric from a box on the floor during a party at W2 Community Media Arts.

Karp and Lam clearly enjoy wrapping different colours of lace around their necks and their fingertips.

There’s pink, blue, orange, yellow, white, and racy black. “Lace porn,” Karp blurts out at one point, which elicits a great deal of laughter from her friend.

Anyone seeing them frolicking with the contents of the box would have had trouble comprehending that all this lace is at the centre of a serious public-health message.

The April 23 event at W2 in the Woodward’s complex marked the launch of the Lace Campaign, which was created by eight young women to spread the word that getting a Pap test not only prevents cervical cancer but is also an act of empowerment.

As music blared from a nearby room, Karp, a 24-year-old freelance writer, explained that lace appeals to many of the women that she and Lam are trying to reach.

“Friends that I talk to really love this campaign because it moves women to take care of themselves in a way that makes sense nowadays,” she said at the party.

Last year, the B.C. Cancer Agency contracted a local marketing company, Hello Cool World, to devise ways to encourage young women between 21 and 30 to get Pap tests after noting that they were not getting them at the same rate as older women. Company founder Katherine Dodds told the Georgia Straight at the party that she recruited eight young women to develop an appealing way to convey the message that women between 21 and 30 should start getting the test done regularly after they become sexually active.

“It’s not a fundraising campaign,” Dodds emphasized. “It’s an awareness campaign.”

Karp said she heard about the project last summer after moving to Vancouver from Toronto. She had been involved in sex education in the past, and she said she liked the way the marketing company let the young women, known as the action team, take the reins.

She noted that the red ribbon has become associated with AIDS, and the pink ribbon has come to symbolize breast cancer.

“We didn’t want another colour,” Karp said. “We wanted to take something that could be everywhere. We thought lace. Women like lace—sexy women, burlesque women, cute women.”

They created a Facebook group, started making videos, and developed a Web site, which enables young women to sign up for e-mail reminders to get their Pap test.

Lam, a 22-year-old child-care worker, told the Straight at the party that she doesn’t think young women resist getting Pap tests. It’s more often a case of just forgetting.

“I did have a couple of scares before,” Lam said. “They found some abnormal cells.”

Because she was tested, the precancerous cells were removed before they could develop into cervical cancer.But according to B.C. Cancer Agency pathologist Dirk van Niekerk, cervical cancer remains the second-most-common cancer among women in the world, claiming 300,000 lives every year.

He told the Straight by phone that it’s far less prevalent in B.C. because of screening programs, with approximately 150 cases being diagnosed each year.

Nearly 80 percent of B.C. women have regular Pap tests, he noted, whereas only 70 percent of those between 21 and 30 undergo regular screening.

The Lace Campaign is adding some glam to getting a regular pap test.

Van Niekerk, medical leader of the Cervical Cancer Screening Program, said that cervical cancers are caused by the human papilloma virus, which is spread through sex and which has a lengthy latency period.