How to keep pipe-cleaner flowers looking new

A pipe cleaner is a length of thin wire with soft fibre spun around it. That is the whole material, and almost everything about looking after one of our pieces follows from it. The wire is why a stem holds a curve. The fibre is why it catches dust. Neither of them minds being ignored for a month.

Here is the short version: keep it dry, keep it out of hard sunlight, dust it occasionally, and bend it back when it goes crooked.

Dust it, do not wash it

Fibre holds dust the way a soft toy does — slowly, and mostly on the upward faces of the petals. Once every few weeks:

• Blow across the bloom first. Most of it leaves that way.
• For the rest, a dry make-up brush or a clean, soft paintbrush, worked from the centre of the flower outwards along the petal.
• A hairdryer on its coolest setting, held a hand's width away, is quicker for a bouquet with a lot of petals.

Do not run it under a tap, and do not use a damp cloth on the fibre. Water gets into the wire, and a wire that has been wet is a wire that will eventually mark the fibre from the inside. Nothing here is washable, and nothing here needs to be.

Bent is not broken

This is the part people are most nervous about, and the part that matters least. A stem that has been squashed in a parcel or knocked off a desk is doing exactly what the wire inside it is meant to do.

Hold the stem just below the bend between finger and thumb, and ease it back with your other hand. Work in small movements along the length rather than one sharp correction at the crease — the same way you would straighten a wire, which is what you are doing.

Petals are the same. If one has splayed outwards, pinch the base of it and roll it gently back towards the centre. If a bloom looks flat, open the petals out one at a time and it will come back.

The one thing worth avoiding is working the same spot back and forth many times over. Wire does not like that anywhere, and a stem is no exception.

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Where to put it

• Out of direct sun. Strong, all-day sunlight is the only thing that will visibly age a piece, and what it does is fade the colour — pinks and lilacs first. A windowsill that gets a couple of hours of morning light is fine; a south-facing ledge in May is not.
• Away from the stove. Fibre picks up cooking grease out of the air, and greasy fibre is the one kind of dust that will not brush out.
• Not in the bathroom. Steady humidity is the enemy of a wire core.

A desk, a shelf, a bedside table, the top of a bookcase — all fine, indefinitely. These are indoor pieces. Left outside, weather will do to them what weather does.

Packing one away

If a piece is seasonal and lives in a cupboard for most of the year, store it upright in a box with something soft filling the space around it, rather than flat under other things. The wire will hold whatever shape it is left in for six months, and it is easier to not crush a bouquet than to rebuild one.

When to just ask us

Message us on WhatsApp if a piece arrives damaged — that is a transit claim, and we need it within 24 hours of delivery with an unbroken unboxing video, which is set out in our refund policy. Outside that window, if something has come loose after a year on a shelf, tell us anyway. Most of it we can talk you through fixing in two minutes, because most of it is a bend.