This name is not the apple of parents’ eyes.
Expectant parents are not fond of “weird” celebrity baby names — and the most rotten of the bunch is Apple, the name Gwyneth Paltrow gave her daughter.
Baby name consultant Colleen Slagen came to this conclusion after sending expectant parents a questionnaire asking their naming likes and dislikes.
“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 help parents find the perfect name for their bundle of joy.
“I feel like 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.
“When we were first pregnant, her daddy said, ‘If it’s a girl I think her name should be Apple,’” Paltrow told Oprah in 2004. “It sounded so sweet, and it conjured such a lovely picture for me, you know. Apples are so sweet and they’re wholesome, 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 can’t get weird enough,” Slagen said of celebrity baby names trends. “Everyone’s trying to out-unique the other 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 searching for names that are “familiar — which is code for not weird — but not so popular.”
“Everybody wants this sort 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 an explanation of why she chose 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 couple of 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 came to revealing her own children’s names — said some even contact her from the hospital.
“Oftentimes, this is when they didn’t know gender, like, ‘It’s actually a girl. Now we’re down to these three names, but we don’t have middle names that we like with it,’” she explained ahead of the release of her book “Naming Bebe,” out on June 10.
She also helps parents who are suffering from baby name regret.
“I’ve had people say ‘I named my baby Ava’ and I’m regretting it. I didn’t know how popular it was,’” she said.
“This year, I had two clients who changed their baby’s name at 1 year 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 have a bunch of people who go down Reddit rabbit holes,” she said.
“Social media kind of does that to everything and makes you question what you have.”
Her most viral videos tackle topics such as ’80s girl names that did not age well — where she lists Heather, Erica, Courtney, Tara and Lindsay — which got close to 1 million views, and “What is the modern day Marie of middle names?” to which her answer is James, which racked up 1.5 million.
She also dished on some of her most unique requests.
“I had one couple whose kids and dogs had music-inspired names like Jagger, Marley and Harrison. They were looking for a girl name that would fit 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 pick a letter from each category in a certain order — It was like a game of Scrabble.”
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