Gender reveal parties have been making the headlines for a number of reasons in recent months, with increasingly creative, unusual and even dangerous stunts being used to reveal a baby’s gender.
What started out as a fairly innocuous trend – a fun way to let friends and relatives know if the expected baby was a boy or a girl – has recently become a victim of its own success, as people look for new ways to make the announcement (while also creating a new content strand on their socials, of course).
“Gender reveal balloons have been extremely on trend in recent years and are constantly growing in popularity, along with the innovative Deco Bubble balloons,” Pioneer’s head of marketing Julie Dommett said earlier this year. “We have had retailers that have reported exponentially increased sales on the back of the gender reveal trend in the last few months.”
“There is a growing trend for gender reveal parties, where an expectant couple shares the news of their future baby’s gender with friends and family,” agrees Neviti’s director Tracey Brown. “We added ‘Boy or Girl?’ bunting or scratch cards to our most popular baby collections and our new gender reveal balloon which can be filled with either pink or blue confetti and burst for the big reveal has been a popular choice for this happy occasion.”
While cutting open cakes and popping confetti-filled balloons are (happily) still the most popular ways of dramatically revealing a baby’s gender, a number of more methods have been highlighted for all the wrong reasons.
Recent mishaps have included exploding cars, rogue fireworks, wildfires, an airplane crash in Texas (after the pilot dumped about 350 gallons of pink water) and one event in Iowa even resulted in a fatality when a relative was struck in the head by shrapnel from a ‘pipe bomb’ her family had created to announce the baby’s gender.
