The bouquet toss was once a ubiquitous wedding tradition: The bride throws her flowers toward a throng of single women and whoever catches it is supposedly the next to wed.
But some brides are not only rethinking this ritual — they are keeping the bouquet altogether.
Lauren Wallace, 28, who owns a floral preservation business called Maed by Mini in Syracuse, N.Y., should know. She said she had enough business by 2023 to go full time, and this year has scheduled more than 120 bridal bouquet preservations. (As for her own wedding this past October, “I didn’t even consider a bouquet toss.”)
Her work takes influence from the oil paintings of bouquets by the 17th-century Flemish masters. To preserve the bouquet, the flowers are processed in silica gel for about a month to dry, before being cast in a custom wooden vessel. Then, multiple layers of resin are poured over the flowers to build depth and clarity before sanding, applying a topcoat of resin and refinishing the wood.
“There’s not much you get to take from your wedding day, but this can be transformed into something new,” Wallace said. The starting price is $1,000, and she can use remaining floral scraps in coasters, earrings and pendants for an additional cost.
The trend may also reflect a shift in cultural attitudes toward being single. “Marriage has started to feel less like an achievement,” said Amy Shack Egan, who calls herself “the anti-wedding wedding planner” and founded Cheersy, a wedding coordinator booking platform. “So throwing a bouquet to your single friends, assuming they’re all dying to get married, is borderline offensive.”
She added that she hardly ever saw a bouquet toss these days.
Rather than opting for real flowers, brides are increasingly experimenting with alternative forms. Donna Collinson, an artist from Thorpe Waterville, England, known as the Glass Florist, began making glass bouquets during Covid and quickly became an internet sensation.
“The sustainability impact of fresh flowers is huge,” she said. Instead, a bouquet “can become an heirloom piece that you pass down.”
The bouquets are made by glass rods that Collinson torches at about 1,200 degrees before using various tools to shape the molten glass. Her bouquets range from $250 to $900. A typical bridal bouquet costs between $100 and $350.
“It’s a two in one, basically,” said Rachel Pecuh, the designer behind Le Métier, a French-beaded floral shop based out of Vancouver, Canada. Last year, one of Pecuh’s posts on TikTok garnered over 15 million views.
“About 85 percent of what I do is for weddings or wedding bouquet preservation — beaded recreations of people’s flower bouquets,” she said.
Since that surge in interest, Pecuh last year quit her job as an archaeologist specializing in resource management and now makes beaded bouquets full time. Costs for her bouquets start at a little over $300. “It takes two to three days for me to complete a bouquet,” she said. “Usually, I send a sketch and collage of bead shades to the client, making sure that I’m capturing what they want.”
Skye Nilsson began making bridal bouquets out of seashells after seeing a rise in floral preservation artists online. “I thought, how incredible would it be as a beach bride to have an on-theme bouquet that also didn’t need to be preserved to be kept forever,” she said in an email.
Her business, Treasures Untold Au, is based in Sydney, Australia, and her commissions are booked through November 2027. “The shells I use are byproducts of the seafood industry which would otherwise go to a landfill,” she said. Nilsson makes the shell flowers in batches, attaching them to stems. The bouquets take about a month to create and cost nearly $450.
Some brides are crafting their own. Emma Pearce, who works in fashion merchandising and lives in Jersey City, said that when she was growing up around the beach, she would collect seashells with her mother. “I mentioned the idea to my mom,” she said of a seashell bouquet, “and she found inspiration on Pinterest to figure out the base.” In April, Pearce, 26, posted on TikTok her mother’s unveiling of her seashell bouquet and it spread quickly.
For her wedding last year, Danielle Felix, a content creator in Madera, Calif., crocheted her bridal bouquet in about three days. “I did throw a one-dollar Dollar Tree bouquet instead of throwing my bouquet,” Felix, 27, said.
She said she hopes her daughter, should she have one, will one day walk down the aisle with the bouquet she made.
Out of 300 weddings in the last three years, Kristine Sattorre, a founder of the wedding content-creation service Modern Brides BFF, has only see two brides toss the bouquet.
“The consensus is it’s very archaic and awkward,” she said. “For a lot of couples, they choose to be married, rather than thinking that they have to be married.”
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