Blue or pink, the party starts now
Revealing a baby’s gender moves from doctor’s room to the party space
● When TV personality Roxy Burger was midway into her pregnancy, she found out she would be having a girl after friends and family sprayed her and her husband with pink paint.
Journalist Toni Singer-Caon told her family and friends she was having a boy by painstakingly unsealing boxes of Smarties, filling them with blue candy, resealing them, and handing them to family.
Burger and Singer-Caon are among a growing number of expectant South African parents who are opting for fun and unusual ways to reveal the sex of their unborn children.
While gender-reveal parties and videos have been popular in the US for several years, party planners say they are now taking off in South Africa.
They can entail the parents-to-be revealing the sex to loved ones, or a chosen friend, or family, revealing the sex to the expectant couple.
Key to this process is the doctor, who reveals the child’s sex via e-mail or phone to a friend or family, or hides the information in a sealed envelope.
The chosen friend then either orders a cake that is pink or blue inside, or a box of coloured balloons for parents to open in front of celebrating guests.
But gender-reveal parties have gone to extremes in the US — from planes dropping coloured pink or blue powder into the sky to an alligator opening its mouth to reveal bluetinted watermelon.
Burger and her high-school sweetheart husband Neil Shraga wore jeans and white shirts and closed their eyes while friends and family squirted paint on them.
Asked why she had a gender-reveal party and a baby shower ahead of the birth of her daughter Adrienne in January, Burger said: “Why not? Life is too short to not have fun. It was a fun way to find out what sex our baby was.”
No routine scan
Singer-Caon, who gave birth to her son Giuliano in 2016, said she had also made a video of herself opening the box of blue Smarties, which she sent to her friends, prompting her family to dub her unborn baby Smurf.
She said the effort put into revealing a child’s sex was partly due to social media.
“I blame it all on Pinterest,” she said, referring to the website in which people share party, décor and lifestyle ideas.
“Pinterest is the root of complicated party planning — making things more over the top than they need to be.”
Joburg-based public relations practitioner Lauren Mendoza had both a baby shower and gender reveal.
“It is exciting and more of an ‘event’ to cut a cake and have the gender revealed with all my friends and family around me, rather than just in the doctor’s office during a routine scan,” she said.
Event planner Beatrix Lourens said gender-reveal parties were “absolutely” becoming more popular.
“Guests should dress in blue or pink to depict whatever their prediction is, or wear a bow, moustache or badge. Reveal ceremonies include anything from cutting a cake with pink or blue sweets in, opening a box filled with pink or blue balloons/confetti or even powder cannons. These all form a lasting impression on the start of a new life’s journey.”
Her most expensive gender-reveal party cost the parents-to-be just over R2 000 a head. But a potential pitfall of a reveal party is masking disappointment if the sex of the unborn child is not what was hoped for.
Mendoza, who does not plan to have any more children, said: “I was surprised and a little disappointed at first that it was a boy. But now that he is here, I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Popular
Port Elizabeth party-shop owner Carine van Eck said gender-reveal balloons — with either pink or blue confetti inside them — were popular.
“This week we had a gender-reveal first. The mom has arranged a Mexican-themed party and she and dad-to-be will bash open a piñata, which has been filled with the necessary colour confetti.”
But not everyone thinks gender reveals are a good idea.
Clinical psychologist Jonathan Bosworth said they could overemphasise the sex of the child and set up unnecessary and restrictive expectations.
“An overemphasis on a child’s gender, especially a stereotypical one, can be detrimental to the child. Children naturally have different temperaments, personalities and dispositions and these often do not fit with the stereotypes of girls and boys.
“Often the ways we construct gender as a society is that there are only a few ‘right’ ways of being a feminine or masculine person.”