There are gender reveal balloons, smoke cannons, and sponge cakes – but now you can find out if your baby is a boy or a girl with a full-on firework display.
Co-owner of Superstars Fireworks in Bristol, Janis Osborne, told Bristol Post that the fireworks – a box of 25, in either pink or blue, for £35 – have proved “really popular” with parents-to-be.
“It’s definitely a growing thing,” she said. “We had them in for a bit of a trial and sold a few, and then people started asking for them, and they’ve been a really good seller for us.”
Osborne said customers have told her they plan to use the fireworks as part of their gender reveal party – or simply to film and post a video on social media to let their friends and family know.
The gender reveal craze has been interpreted more and more creatively by parents. There was the Stranger Things reveal, the gender reveal lasagne, as well as the couple who used a live alligator to announce their baby’s sex.
And we can’t forget the gender reveal stunt in Australia that went very, very wrong. The car was filmed doing “burnouts” on a rural road, after the parents intended to reveal they were having a boy by letting out blue smoke. After driving a short distance, the car suddenly set alight. Queensland Police released the footage in a bid to deter others from similar stunts.
Earlier this year, the conversation started to change after Jenna Karvunidis, the woman said to have “invented” the parties, said she’d had a change of heart.
Karvunidis and her husband threw a party 10 years ago to reveal the gender of their baby. The cake-cutting party, where Karvunidis found out she was having a girl via the medium of pink food colouring, went viral after she blogged about it.
But now, Karvunidis feels a little differently – all thanks to Bee, her 10-year-old daughter who expresses herself in non-binary ways. Back in July, the mum wrote on social media: “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.
“Who cares what gender the baby is?” she wrote. “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.”