The inventor of the gender-reveal party regrets what she started. These 11 other creators have lamented their contributions, too.

Aylin Woodward,Susie NeilsonSep 9, 2020, 01:53 IST

A gender reveal event in April 2017 started the 47,000-acre Sawmill Fire in the Santa Rita Mountain foothills, southeast of Tucson, Arizona.US Forest Service/AP

A smoke bomb at a gender-reveal party in Southern California ignited a 10,500-acre wildfire over the weekend.
Jenna Karvunidis, a mom and blogger who's widely credited with inventing gender reveals, took to Facebook to lament her creation.
Karvunidis isn't the only creator to regret her brainchild. At least 11 other inventors lament the technology, animals, or holidays they created.

Jenna Karvunidis had no idea that her excitement about her baby would spur a worldwide trend.

The blogger from Los Angeles and her husband, Niko, had lost several pregnancies before carrying their first child to term in 2008. At a party ahead of the birth, they announced to family and friends that their baby was a girl by slicing open a cake to reveal pink.

Twelve years after Karvunidis wrote about the cake gimmick, gender-reveal parties have become increasingly common, elaborate, and occasionally destructive. On Saturday, pyrotechnics at a gender reveal in El Dorado Ranch Park, California, sparked a 10,500-acre fire that has forced nearly 20,000 people to evacuate. The fire is still raging.

Karvunidis now regrets ever coming up with the idea.

"For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid's penis," Karvunidis wrote Monday in a Facebook post about the fire. "No one cares but you."

Karvunidis isn't the only inventor who later regretted the way their creation evolved. Here are 11 other creators who lamented the technology, animals, or holidays they added to the world.

Before the current California fire, gender-reveal parties previously started two other blazes.

A gender reveal cake. Getty/Jeneil S

Anna Jarvis, the creator of Mother's Day, hated the holiday so much that she later got arrested for protesting it.

Flowers in buckets at a shop. Unsplash/Alisa Anton

The inventor of the Labradoodle, Wally Conron, hated that his creation helped grow a designer-dog industry.

A Labradoodle rests on the ground. Shutterstock

The inventor of single-use Keurig K-Cups, John Sylvan, told The Atlantic: "I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it."

A Starbucks hot cocoa Keurig K-Cup. Melissa Hillier/Flickr

Robert Propst, who invented the office cubicle, went to his grave hating what his creation had done to the American worker.

An Air Canada employee works in an office cubicle. Rachel Askinasi/Business Insider

Albert Einstein helped split the uranium atom in 1938. That research into nuclear fission contributed to the development of the atomic bomb.

Manhattan Project officials, including Robert Oppenheimer (white hat), inspect the remains of the Trinity atomic test in 1945. Los Alamos National Laboratory/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, also didn't like how his invention was used.

The mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, August 9, 1945. Hiromichi Matsuda/Wikimedia Commons

Kamran Loghman also created a weapon that he regretted: pepper spray.

Police shoot pepper spray at a protester in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 31, 2020. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

Tim Berners-Lee, who coded the World Wide Web, came to regard his invention as "anti-human."

Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee delivers a speech during an event at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, on March 12, 2019. Associated Press

Berners-Lee even regretted the double-slash in URLs.

A double-slash in a URL. Susie Neilson

The creator of the pop-up ad, Ethan Zuckerman, apologized to internet users directly for creating "one of the most hated tools in the advertiser's toolkit."

A stock image of a pop-up ad. Sam72/Shutterstock

Vincent Connare, designer of the font Comic Sans, told the Wall Street Journal: "If you love it, you don't know much about typography."

A sign written in Comic Sans font. Jon Russell/Flickr

Scott Fahlman created one of the earliest emoticons, which have evolved into emojis. "Sometimes I feel like Dr. Frankenstein," he told The Wall Street Journal in 2013.

A range of emoticons available via iMessage on Apple phones. Aylin Woodward/Business Insider

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