What's the difference between silk / artificial / faux and fake flowers?

There are four main terms for synthetic flowers…. artificial, fake, faux and silk.

They are all pretty much interchangeable these days. Savvy marketing teams across the globe discovered that if they call their standard plastic flowers ‘silk flowers’ they could benefit from people assuming the quality is higher… when in reality it’s not.

Same goes for batting the words ‘luxury’ and ‘realistic’ around… it’s all a matter of marketing and opinion.

Unlike ‘Champagne’ there are no rules around terms that are used to describe artificial flowers.

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To break it down:

Artificial flowers is a catchall term for flowers that were made and not grown.

Fake flowers is another catchall term for flowers that were made and not grown.

Faux flowers are what I prefer to call mine because strictly speaking they are made from a variety of materials AND ‘faux’ just sounds a little nicer than ‘fake’. Essentially though, it’s another catchall term for (you guessed it) flowers that have been made and not grown.

“Silk flowers” tends to imply a higher quality stem because silk is an expensive material that used to be used to create faux flowers. In reality though, you’ll notice even the most awful quality fake flowers are referred to as ‘silk’ so the term has lost much of its meaning.

So in short – call them what’d like to call them.

Unfortunately, we cannot use these words to easily identify what quality of faux flowers you’re looking at but I do have a few things you can look for, detailed here:

‍How to spot great quality faux flowers

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