Anyone else have an irrational fear of popular celebrities using the same baby name as you and thus making it way more popular...?

[RoseAdagio]

Nothing wrong with popular baby names because most of the super popular ones are beautiful (Amelia, Olivia, Sophia, Eva etc...). But when you have a beautiful name for you child where there's only usually 40-odd kids in the entire country per year, it would obviously be a bit of a bummer if suddenly someone like Molly-Mae had a super high profile, used the name you gave your kid, and suddenly there were hundreds of them! Case in point - the massive rise in popularity of Harper since the Beckhams used it....

Anyone else think like this or do I REALLY need to get out more?!

you can't control that.
you also can't control someone in your circle snatching name after baby is born. and it's not like you own the name, so you can't complain, so don't worry.

Your scenario did happen with my DD’s name. It’s just the luck of the draw. It’s rare in her age group so she jokes she’ll be able to knock ten years off her age when all the youngsters sharing her name are grown up.

It’s still a lovely name and I can’t imagine her being called anything else.

We’re TTC and I love the name Alba for a girl. Charlotte Crosby has just named her baby this which has put me off it a bit to be honest!

There's no point worrying about something you can't predict. Even if a celebrity does use a certain name, there's no guarantee it will rocket in popularity anyway. Cristiano Ronaldo, one of most famous men on the entire planet, has a young daughter named Alana, but her birth didn't make any significant impact on that name's popularity.

She’s also called her Alba Jean so I just hear aubergine.

😆

I have something a bit similar, inasmuch as I was going to name our next bitch puppy Mabel, and then along came the wonderful Olive and Mabel…

It's fair to have that fear OP. I always think of a friend who name her baby Elsa years before Frozen!

Yes I do as my name was chosen by her as a not used name…. No one older than me has my name except now it’s been in the top 50 names for the last 20 or so years

This happened to us.
🤷‍♀️
Nothing you can do.
Very very few with this name and then boom - up at the top of the names chart for years.

I think this is the issue with choosing a name that us too unusual, you run the risk of it becoming associated with something. Like the name Juno, most people would think of the film when they hear it now, and Elsa as mentioned up thread. A more popular name could be used in a film or by a celebrity but it doesn’t create an association.

I agree, a good example being the names Harry and Hermione.

With the name Harry many won't make the connection to Harry Potter, despite it being the main characters name, as there are so many others with the name. Where as for many the only association they have with the name Hermione is the Harry Potter books / films.

Yes! It put the name from well out of the top 100 to number 7.

Yes - I have been pregnant at the same time as Victoria Beckham and Beyoncé and gave birth just before them.
I had an irrational 'fear' / worry that I would chose the same name as they did and then people would think I had copied them!
As it was DD was born just before a v v v popular book was published and DD coincidentally had the heroine's name.
I taught her from a v early age to say to people when asked if she was named after the character NO

Not really tbh. Unless you make one up it's likely to happen at some point.

My poor friend had a Charlotte and George just before the royals. That would annoy me so much.

I've never wanted children but if an alien handed me a daughter I'd call her Eve after my nan. I was irrationally annoyed when Eve/Eva etc became really popular.

Yep l would be gutted

I like Alba but my fiancé’s isn’t convinced

Not so much this, but I DO fear my children’s names becoming a meme like Karen or an AI like Alexa. Just have to hope!

Most people will either have no idea who she is and if they do, are very unlikely to know what she named her kid.

Happened to us. Famous sportsman and actress/model/singer wife (being deliberately vague) named their daughter the same name as my newborn DS. Theirs was born a couple of weeks after mine. It is not a common name (think along the lines of Rocco/Indiana/Hendrix/Bodhi - that sort of uncommon). This was several years ago, and luckily, it doesn't actually seem to have made any impact at all on the name stats. What's crazy though is that the father and my children's father also have the same name, which was not all that common either (when they were kids has since become a bit more mainstream), but spelled slightly differently (pronounced the same though) - think Sebastien/Sebastian.
I have only had one person comment about it.

I know someone, who very much aspires to the upper middle class life, who called her son Kit shortly before Wayne and Colleen Rooney called their son Kit. She wasn't amused.

(I was though)

My DDs middle name was chosen as Florence by her big brother. 2 weeks later David Cameron named his daughter this. We hadn't got around to registering her name thank fuck as I wouldn't have wanted her to be connected to the pig head shagger in anyway.

Nah, I'd probably just smugly joke that I'm a trendsetter and the celebrity copied me XD

Both my DDs ended up with fairly unusual (though classic) names, but just because we liked them, not because we wanted rare. DD2 was very nearly Eve and if we'd had a boy he'd have been William both very popular!

That's sadly just the risk you take if you go for a less commonplace name, vs the known risk of there likely being a few in school of the currently popular or timeless/classic type names. You can't win with baby names on that front! You can try to guess based on current trends or upswings, but it sometimes only takes one celeb/hit tv show/film .

But at least it would be better to have a name become trendy and overused because of some celeb, than it become (in)famous because someone who happens to share that uncommon name did something horrible or even just embarrassing (to kids/teens) in future. That was always the bigger worry for me if I'd decided on an uncommon name for DC.

You can try to pick a middle ground and use a name that happens to less popular now than it was it the past (so lots of culture references still, but unlikely to meet many others their age) but then you risk people saying it's a Mum's/Dads/dated name and even then it could still have an unexpected pop-culture moment...😂