The trend of hosting gender reveal parties have increased immensely since becoming popular in 2008. Jenna Karvunidis is credited with creating the trend when she held the first recorded gender party for her unborn child. The party was simply her and her family cutting into a cake to reveal the color of the icing in the middle – spoiler alert, it was a girl.
Ever since that first simple party of revealing a baby’s gender, the trend has gone completely viral. Many soon-to-be parents have stuffed cakes with colored icing, cookies with M&Ms, and even stuffed gender identifying candy into stork-shaped pinatas. These type of gender reveals are not the issue, these are the tame ones.
When the family decides they want to go bigger and better is when the issues creep in. Some do “lab experiments,” and have powder color fights. Of course, these can only cause minor irritations if a participant gets one of the ingredients in their eye.
The danger lies when the family strives to have the most outlandish gender reveal party. Reports show that there have been seven gender reveal deaths in the United States since 2017. That may not seem like a big number. However, given the fact that the trend is on a current upswing, the number of casualties can increase dramatically.
On October 26, 2019, Pamela Kreimeyer, a 56-year-old grandmother, was at her family’s gender reveal party, eagerly waiting to see if the new grandbaby was going to be a boy or a girl. Unfortunately, she never even got to meet the new grandbaby.
Apparently, the contraption was supposed to shoot the colored powder into the air and reveal the gender. Sadly, the gun powder used to catapult the powder out of the metal tube mixed with the powder inadvertently created a pipe bomb. Like any pipe bomb, it exploded, sending metal shrapnel over 140 yards from the contraption. The grandmother was standing a mere 45 feet from it.
Two more families were forever marred by a homemade contraption that did not go as planned. In Gaines Township, Michigan on February 6, 2021, Evan Thomas Silva, a 26-year-old died when his gender reveal cannon exploded and struck him.
Christopher Pekny, a 28-year-old father-to-be from Liberty, N.Y. was killed while creating a contraption for his gender reveal party when it exploded in his garage. His brother Michael was also injured.
The most recent on occurred on March 29, 2021 off of the Caribbean Sea near the Mexican coast. Two pilots were killed while flying their plane with a sign reading “It’s a girl.”
The two most devastating ones were in April 2017 and September 2020. In 2017, an Arizona Border Patrol agent shot a rifle at a Tannerite filled container and cause the Sawmill wildfire that burned over 45,000 acres in the Coronado National Forest.
The 2020 incident occurred in San Bernardino County, Calif. when a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” that was supposed to reveal the gender of a baby caused the El Dorado fire. The out-of-control blaze burned over 24,000 acres, took the life of a fire fighter, and caused 12 other non-fatal injuries.
Taking all this into account, it is perfectly fine to be excited about bringing a child into the world and announcing it. Keep in mind, however, that not all ideas are good ideas.