Woman Who Made Gender-Reveal Parties A Thing: Stop These 'Stupid Parties'
The woman credited with making gender-reveal parties popular has a request after a major California wildfire was ignited during one such event over the weekend: “Stop having these stupid parties.”
On Saturday morning, a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party sparked the El Dorado Fire east of Los Angeles, which has since burned more than 9,670 acres and forced thousands of people to evacuate. It remained only 7% contained on Monday evening amid extreme weather conditions.
The device would typically generate blue or pink smoke to indicate the gender of an expected baby, a formula that the numerous iterations of these parties follow. (It’s not yet clear what colour it was in this instance).
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“Stop it. Stop having these stupid parties. For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis,” Jenna Karvunidis wrote on Facebook on Monday. “No one cares but you.”
Karvunidis threw what’s now known as a gender reveal party in 2008, she told HuffPost in a phone interview. She didn’t call it that at the time, though. She simply threw a party where she and her family discovered that she was going to have a baby girl by cutting into a cake that contained pink icing.
“I was just trying to get my family more involved and excited as my sister-in-law just had a baby,” she said.
After posting about it on her blog, High Gloss and Sauce, the idea was picked up by a local magazine called The Bump. Karvunidis said in the following years, she noticed the events became more prevalent.
Last year, after a Twitter user described Karvunidis as the “inventor” of the gender-reveal party, she told NPR that her views on gender had changed.
“Who cares what gender the baby is? I did at the time because we didn’t live in 2019 and didn’t...
