What to look for in dried-look bouquets
The palette should look faded, not painted
Dried flowers lose colour unevenly. A stem bleaches at the tip and holds more colour at the base, and the browns that creep in are part of the look rather than a fault. What gives a poor version away is saturation: bright dyed pinks and hard oranges across every stem at the same intensity. If the whole bunch sits at one volume, it was coloured rather than aged.
Count the different materials
A dried-look bouquet is carried by variety of texture rather than by flowers, because most of what is in it is not a flower. Look for several distinct things — a grass, a seed head, something papery, something woody, something soft. A few plumes and a lot of filler is the cheap build, and it looks thin the moment it goes into a vase.
Buy the bunch or buy the stems
The only reason to buy a bouquet rather than loose stems is that the arranging is already done. There is no other advantage — nothing here sheds or snaps whichever way you buy it. If you want to build your own and control the height, buy stems instead; you will usually spend less and end up with something that fits your vase rather than the photograph’s.