Mochan you are so right about other people. The thing is, it's so churlish to ask people not to buy a particular item or colour, or to do anything other than express gratitude when you receive a pink ironing board and a "When I grow up I'm going to work at Spearmint Rhino" t-shirt.
Again, with this, I try to tread a middle ground, and say things like "Oh, DD loves Geomag/Octonauts" (which she does) and hope people get things along this line.
Gifts are always gifts and you should be grateful and gracious, but there's v few people to whom you can say "Please don't get her such-and-such, we don't do the princess thing" to.
Thankfully we do have a few close people who know what we're like...it's the outliers and the people who think she'll be missing out if she doesn't have a pissy pink (my least fave shade) teddy that are the prob.
What makes it worse 9as we've found recently) is that she'll open these type of presents and go all goo-ey for a few minutes, leading to "Awwwwww, see, that's what she needs......". After a few mins she's discarded said item for ever and is back to pulling moonies at all and sundry and scrapping over the Gup-A with her DB.