Why every newborn you see on Facebook is wrapped in the same baby blanket

The morning after my second daughter was born I took her picture—she was beautiful, serene—and posted it on Facebook. There was much my Facebook friends could surmise from the photo, and much that marketers could mine: her date of birth and her eye color and her name, for instance. But what they knew for certain was that Athena had been born at the hospital.

The dead giveaway? The blanket.

You’ve seen the one, whether you’ve had a baby or not: it is mostly white, with thick blue and thinner pink stripes at the edges. If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve seen it tens, maybe hundreds of times.

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