Gender Reveal

The gender-reveal party, now a familiar ritual of pink or blue, is generally traced to a single blog post written in July 2008.¹

Its author, the Los Angeles blogger Jenna Karvunidis, has since said she regrets the part she played.¹

Karvunidis and her husband Niko held a small party that year to learn the sex of their first child, and the inside of the cake was pink.¹ She wrote about it on her blog and on a parenting forum, the magazine The Bump later featured the party, and she came to be credited with popularising the idea.¹

On 23 April 2017, near Green Valley in Arizona, an off-duty Border Patrol agent named Dennis Dickey fired a rifle at a target containing the explosive Tannerite and a coloured powder meant to announce his baby's sex.^{2, 4} The explosion started the Sawmill Fire, which burned more than 45,000 acres and caused losses of more than $8 million.² He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour, was sentenced to five years' probation, and was ordered to pay $8,188,069 in restitution.²

On 5 September 2020 a smoke-generating pyrotechnic set off at a gender-reveal photoshoot in El Dorado Ranch Park, Yucaipa, California, ignited the grass.³ The El Dorado Fire burned nearly 23,000 acres and destroyed about 20 buildings.³ On 17 September Charles Morton, a Forest Service firefighter with 18 years' experience, died when flames overran the remote area where he was working.³ In February 2024 Refugio Manuel Jimenez Jr pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to a year in county jail and two years' felony probation.³ His wife, Angelina Renee Jimenez, pleaded guilty to misdemeanours, and the couple were ordered to pay $1,789,972 in restitution.³

Karvunidis wrote about the California fire in 2020.¹ She has said she finds modern reveals excessive for so minor a detail, and that focusing on a baby's sex at birth overlooks everything else the child may become.¹ She suggests parents hold a party to announce a name instead.¹

A ritual that began with the colour of a cake has outgrown the person who started it.