This name is just not the apple of fogeys’ eyes.
Expectant parents usually are not keen on “weird” celebrity baby names — and essentially the most rotten of the bunch is Apple, the name Gwyneth Paltrow gave her daughter.
Baby name consultant Colleen Slagen got here to this conclusion after sending expectant parents a questionnaire asking their naming likes and dislikes.
“Probably the most common example they gave is, ‘We don’t want names like Apple,’” said Slagen, 35, who charges $300 for a 45-minute Zoom meeting to assist parents find the proper name for his or her bundle of joy.
“I feel prefer it was the shocking name of our generation.”
Apple Martin, now 20, is the offspring of the Academy Award-winning actress and her ex-husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.
“After we were first pregnant, her daddy said, ‘If it’s a lady I feel her name needs to be Apple,’” Paltrow told Oprah in 2004. “It sounded so sweet, and it conjured such a stunning picture for me, you recognize. Apples are so sweet and so they’re healthful, and it’s biblical.”
Apple set the stage for A-listers who began giving their kids equally bizarre birth names — like Jay-Z and Beyonce’s Blue Ivy, Kate Winslet’s Bear Blaze and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s North.
“Nowadays it’s like you may’t get weird enough,” Slagen said of celebrity baby names trends. “Everyone’s attempting to out-unique the opposite person.”
Slagen — a former nurse practitioner who left her job in 2023 to run her baby-naming business full time — said that unlike celebrity parents-to-be, her clients are trying to find names which are “familiar — which is code for not weird — but not so popular.”
“Everybody wants this form of unicorn name . . . not the Olivias, not the Emmas, not the Avas and Isabellas,” she said.
After an initial consultation, Slagen compiles a 10-name list for the couple with a proof of why she selected each, and includes popularity data from the Social Security Administration.
Her clients run the gamut from low-key to Type A.
“I’ve had a few clients send me Excel spreadsheets with multiple tabs of color-coded, categorized names,” she said.
Slagen, a Boston mom of three — who was coy when it got here to revealing her own children’s names — said some even contact her from the hospital.
“Oftentimes, that is after they didn’t know gender, like, ‘It’s actually a lady. Now we’re all the way down to these three names, but we don’t have middle names that we like with it,’” she explained ahead of the discharge of her book “Naming Bebe,” out on June 10.
She also helps parents who’re affected by baby name regret.
“I’ve had people say ‘I named my baby Ava’ and I’m regretting it. I didn’t know the way popular it was,’” she said.
“This yr, I had two clients who modified their baby’s name at 1 yr old. And I had someone recently email me about their 3-year-old’s name.”
Slagen, who has over 72,000 followers on her TikTok handle @namingbebe, credits social media for making parents doubt their decision.
“I actually have a bunch of people that go down Reddit rabbit holes,” she said.
“Social media type of does that to the whole lot and makes you query what you might have.”
Her most viral videos tackle topics reminiscent of ’80s girl names that didn’t age well — where she lists Heather, Erica, Courtney, Tara and Lindsay — which got near 1 million views, and “What’s the trendy day Marie of middle names?” to which her answer is James, which racked up 1.5 million.
She also dished on a few of her most original requests.
“I had one couple whose kids and dogs had music-inspired names like Jagger, Marley and Harrison. They were searching for a lady name that might slot in and I included options like Frankie [Frank Sinatra], Jovi [Bon Jovi] and Lane [Penny Lane],” she said.
“I also worked with a Chinese mom who had this diagram of letters and in her culture you had to choose a letter from each category in a certain order — It was like a game of Scrabble.”
