This trend known for spawning countless viral disasters has officially hit a new low: the toilet.
One dad-to-be from the Philippines is getting prepared for fatherhood by flushing his baby’s gender reveal down the loo — literally.
On New Year’s Day, Banong Delos Angeles invited family and friends to the party at his home where he revealed the gender of his future newborn — but instead of colored smoke or confetti cannons, he chose a stream of dyed water swirled down the bowl to announce his news.
To set the festive mood, he even decorated his bathroom with pink and blue balloons and metallic streamers, complete with a handwritten sign that read, “press to reveal” hanging over the commode.
In the resulting viral video, Delos Angeles gathered partygoers into the bathroom and around the small toilet where they counted down to the reveal. Once it was time for the big leak, Delos Angeles pushed the flusher on the top of the porcelain throne to reveal bright blue-colored water, announcing that their child will be male. The flush was met with excited cheers and claps from the bowled-over group, with some guests yelling, “It’s a boy!”
“My son will be named Urbano Delos Angeles VI,” Delos Angeles told Newsflare. “I hope my guests enjoyed my low-budget gender reveal.”
However, although his rendition may have been what Delos Angeles called “low-budget,” it was fairly tame compared to some other versions of the viral trend.
In one instance, an Australian family’s gender reveal went up in flames in July 2019 after they equipped their car with special smoking tires to blow colorful smog to announce what they were having — only for the car to end up ablaze. In March 2021, two people were killed during a gender reveal in Cancun, Mexico, after a single-engine Cessna 206 ended up nosediving into the lagoon while streaming a sign about a baby girl.
The phenomenon has even sent some areas into a state of emergency. In September 2020, a gender reveal in San Bernardino County, California, started a massive wildfire after a small group of people set off a pyrotechnic device to release pink or blue smoke. The fire spread over 10,500 acres.
With many gender-reveal disasters over the years, it has prompted the genius behind the trend, mommy blogger Jenna Karvunidis, 39, to admit that she regrets leading the movement — but not necessarily due to their physical dangers.
“Who cares what gender the baby is?” Karvunidis wrote in a viral July 2019 Facebook post. “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.”
Karvunidis, who goes by High Gloss and Sauce online, started the viral tradition in 2008 by slicing into a cake to reveal pink frosting, indicating that she’d be having a girl. Since then, things have changed for Karvunidis and her family.
“PLOT TWIST,” she wrote in the Facebook post at the time. “The world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!”
The mommy blogger has since explained that she believes gender-reveal parties have been forcing babies who haven’t even been born yet into a social construct.
“I’m glad gender-reveal parties brought joy to some people, but that joy has been at the expense of nonbinary and trans people,” Karvunidis told HuffPost.
Now, Karvunidis documents her family’s adventures on Instagram, without a slice of colored cake in sight.
