Gender Reveals

About

Gender Reveals are celebrations where either the guests, the expecting parents, or both find out the sex of the baby usually through elaborate stunts that involve either the color pink (for girl) or blue (for boy).

Origin

In 2008, blogger Jenna Karvunidi wrote about hosting a gender reveal party for her first child and posted it to her now deleted blog High Gloss and Sauce. The post was then picked up by parenting magazine The Bump that same year.

Spread

On October 25th, 2009, YouTuber shelleyblue293 uploaded a video of family and friends cutting into a cake to reveal the sex of the baby. The video has 72,000 views in ten years (shown below). In 2011, gender reveal videos began to emerge on YouTube.^[2] On September 3rd, 2014 Abalabala uploaded the first "Kids React to Baby Gender Reveal Compilation" (shown below).

As of January 2019, The gender reveal party video with the most views was uploaded by The ACE Family on April 10th, 2018. The video has over 15 million views and one million likes (shown below). Methods used to reveal gender in various videos include the release of balloons from a box, spraying silly string in the air in the color of the gender, cutting into a cake, and setting off colored fireworks, to name a few.

On October 8th, 2018, Twitter user mrsrt392 posted a video with the caption "Best gender reveal I've ever seen" (shown below). The video is of an expecting mother popping a balloon that was seemingly expected to reveal the gender of the baby but the balloon was empty. The camera then pans to another woman who removes her black wig to signify that the baby is a boy. The Tweet was gained 2,774 replies, 307,816 retweets and 874,406 likes in a year.

Criticism

The term "gender reveal" often criticized as a misnomer, as all available tests measure the child's sex, which may be distinguished from gender.^[2]
On May 11th, 2016 Jessica Winter wrote a piece^[4] for Slate entitled "Are You a Boy or a Girl? It starts with a gender-reveal celebration, and it culminates at the door of a bathroom in North Carolina." In the article, she states that "the gender-reveal phenomenon pulls off a rousing counter-progressive two-for-one: weapons-grade reinforcement of oppressive gender norms (sorry, feminists!) and blunt-force refusal of the idea that sex assigned at birth does not necessarily equate with gender identity (sorry, trans-rights movement!)." The debate continued. On September 25th, 2018, The New York Times Magazine published a piece^[5] written by Kwame Anthony Appiah entitled "Should I Go to a Gender-Reveal Party?" in which the writer considers the ethics of attending a gender reveal party.

Gender Reveal Lasagna

In 1964 Villa Italian Kitchen opened a pizzeria in New York City. "Today Villa Restaurant Group is comprised of over 300+ locations in 38 states and 6 countries and each location/concept operates from the same basic principle: Made Fresh Daily." ^[1]Villa Italian Kitchen is built on the strict loyalty to authentic old-world recipes that Michele Scotto brought with him from Naples, Italy. The Gender Reveal Lasagna Package costs $139.99 ($11.67 / person) and serves 12. The package includes one cheese lasagna with a secret pink or blue interior, a tray of garlic rolls, and your choice of salad.^[3]

On January 22nd, 2018, Villa Italian Kitchen began promoting their Gender Reveal Lasagna on social media.
On Instagram, their post, complete with photo reel of a couple enjoying their lasagna, gained over three thousand views and 128 likes in the first day (shown below, left). The 27 comments revealed mixed reviews, from disgust to praise (shown below, right).

On January 22nd, 2019, Twitter user Ishanti Nath, posted about the lasagna stating that "this has gone too far." The post gained 168 Likes within a day (shown below, left). The same day, Sara Gregory posted her reaction to the lasagna on Twitter. The tweet was retweeted 85 times and gained 820 likes within a day (shown below, right).

Car Fire

On July 9th, 2019, the Queensland Police Service released footage of a car fire incident, which took place on April 18, 2018 to warn about the dangers of 'burnouts' gender reveals in Australia. That day News 9 Gold Coast uploaded a video of the incident to Twitter (shown below). The video which shows a drivers wheels emitting blue smoke bursting into flames received over 2,400 likes and 700 retweets in a day.

That same day, many Twitter users reacted to the video. Twitter user @Maiasmic ^[6]tweeted "'gender reveal gone wrong' is my favorite cinematic genre" (shown below, left). The tweet gained over 900 likes. Twitter user @colburn918^[7] commented, "I love to dust my friends and family with smurf powder and set my car on fire for my children" which garnered over 1,700 likes and 100 retweets in a day (shown below, right).

Jenna Karvunidis' Reaction to Growing Trend

On July 24th, Twitter user @LouisatheLast^[8] voiced that they were curious about about the "long form history of the gender reveal party phenomenon" (shown below, left). The tweet garnered over 1,600 likes in five days. That same day, Twitter user @ADubiousPronoun responded with an answer saying, "She had a blog that got picked up by a Chicago newspaper. In 2008 when she had her first baby, she made little yellow cakes. One with pink frosting, one blue. Handed a friend the ultrasound info, requested in an envelope, had a friend get the right cake from the fridge" (shown below, right).

The next day, Jenna Karvunidis responded to their thread revealing that she was indeed the "inventor" of the gender reveal party (shown below). She reveals that she has "felt major mixed feelings about [her] contribution to the culture."

That same day, Karvunidis posted a more in-depth description her Facebook^[9] page "High Gloss and Sauce." The post gained over 16,000 likes and 12,000 shares in four days and reads:

"A weird thing came up on Twitter, so I figured I'd share here. Someone remembered it was me who "invented" the gender reveal party. I had written about my party on my blog and a parenting forum in July 2008. It was picked up & and an interview with me was published in The Bump magazine and the idea kinda spread from there. I've got the article framed!

Anyway, I've felt a lot of mixed feelings about my random contribution to the culture. It just exploded into crazy after that. Literally – guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.

Who cares what gender the baby is? I did at the time because we didn't live in 2019 and didn't know what we know now – that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what's between their legs.

PLOT TWIST, the world's first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!

Edit: if you want to see more of Bee’s looks, her Instagram is @bianca_k_actor (I run the account, so if anyone tries to slide into a 10-year-olds dms I will end you 😁)"

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References