Rachel Dunn on faux wedding flowers which still look amazing days, weeks and months after your wedding day

Published by Guest author on August 28, 2026August 28, 2026

Rachel Dunn spends a lot of time thinking about bouquets in an unusual way: not how they look on the morning of the wedding, but how they look days, weeks and months after the big day. As Head of Product at The Faux Flower Company, the Cheltenham-based retailer best known for its realistic artificial arrangements, she oversees the designs couples are increasingly choosing for their wedding floral styling. We caught up with Rachel to talk about what actually happens to a bouquet once the confetti settles, and why more couples are choosing to keep their faux wedding flowers long after the day itself.

Hi Rachel! You came to this from an unusual angle. What’s your background?

I studied Fashion Design at university, then spent the best part of fifteen years in fashion and retail before I ever thought about flowers. What carried over is an eye for how something is made and finished, not just how it photographs on the day. A lot of my time at The Faux Flower Company goes into the details most people never consciously notice: how a stem’s wired so it falls naturally instead of standing to attention, how a petal is painted so the colour shifts slightly rather than sitting flat. Those are fashion instincts applied to flowers.

Why even consider what a bouquet looks like after the big day is over?

Almost everything written about wedding flowers stops at the ceremony. You see the bouquet in the wedding portraits and then the story ends, as if the flowers vanish along with the guests. But they don’t. They’re often thrown out within a few days, gifted to guests or local care homes or they get dried and propped on a shelf looking a bit sad. If they were never fresh to begin with, and the couple chose quality faux wedding arrangements, they carry on looking exactly as they did on the day for years. I wanted to be honest about that timeline rather than just showing another styled shot of a bouquet on the morning of the wedding.

So what actually happens to a real bouquet?

After about four days, most fresh wedding bouquets are already past their best unless someone has preserved them properly, and that takes real effort to press or dry.

By four weeks, unless it went through that process, your bouquet is gone forever, either composted or in the bin.

At four months, there’s usually nothing left to show for it beyond photographs, maybe a single dried stem kept in a drawer.

And the faux version?

Take one of our meadow-style arrangements, which is one we get a lot of interest in around wedding season. Four days after the wedding, it looks exactly as it did on the morning of the ceremony, because nothing about it was ever alive to begin with. Four weeks on, it’s back on the mantelpiece or the hallway table doing the job normal home decor does. Four months later, it still looks as beautiful as it did on the wedding day, and a lot of our customers tell us they bring it back out again for the first anniversary.

Is that the whole pitch, then? Just longevity?

Longevity is the headline, but it’s really about avoiding a waste problem nobody likes to talk about at a wedding. One carbon footprint study puts the figure at just 4% of cut flowers ever getting composted properly, with the rest heading to landfill once they wilt. Wedding flowers are particularly prone to this because they’re bought in bulk for a single day and rarely have anywhere to go afterwards. There’s also a broader shift happening in UK wedding floristry towards foam-free, reusable, lower-waste styling, and a faux bouquet that gets kept and reused fits that shift without asking a couple to compromise on how their photos look.

What would you say to a couple currently torn between real and faux?

Treat your bouquet as an investment piece rather than a disposable prop. Buy floral arrangements you’d actually want sitting in your home afterwards, not just something engineered to look good for four hours under marquee lighting.

If it’s well made, you get the wedding photos and then you get to keep and enjoy the thing itself, which is more than can be said for almost anything else bought for a wedding day.