The chaotic history of the gender reveal party
A cake. A blog post. And, somehow, wildfires. The gender reveal party has one of the odder short histories of any modern tradition.
Where it all started
The modern gender reveal party traces back to a single 2008 blog post. American blogger Jenna Karvunidis, who had been through several earlier pregnancy losses, cut into a cake with her family to reveal pink frosting inside, announcing they were expecting a girl. She wrote it up on her blog, a local magazine picked it up, and the idea spread from there, well before Instagram or Pinterest existed to help it along.
How it got out of hand
Through the 2010s the idea took off on social media and, as these things do, escalated. Cakes gave way to balloons, powder cannons, and increasingly elaborate stunts. Some of it went badly wrong: a 2017 wildfire in Arizona and a much larger 2020 wildfire in California were both traced back to reveal devices, and in 2019 a homemade explosive device at a reveal in Iowa killed a bystander. None of that was the point of the original party, a cake with two people who wanted to celebrate.
Even the founder has mixed feelings
Karvunidis herself has spoken publicly about reconsidering the whole idea, partly prompted by her own daughter's more fluid sense of gender growing up. In 2019 she wrote that she didn't want anyone "to get their joy by giving others pain," and has since suggested that a "pregnancy reveal" or a plain "name reveal" party gets you the same excuse for cake, without assuming quite so much about who a child will turn out to be.
Where we land
We're obviously not against finding out early, that's the whole site. But we'd rather you found out with a £5 email than a powder cannon. And as our "sex" vs "gender" post gets into, what a scan can actually tell you is biological sex, not who your child will grow up to be, which is worth remembering whatever colour the icing ends up being.