Rainbow roses: a careful batch against a rushed one
Two bunches of the same flower can differ more here than in any other category. The colour is drawn up a split stem from several containers of tinted water, which means the result depends on how the splitting was done and how long each stem was left, and both are decisions made by a person under time pressure.
That is why the bunch, rather than the single stem, is the thing to look at.
Consistency across the bunch
Lay the roses side by side before they are wrapped. On a careful batch the heads carry roughly the same set of colours in roughly the same proportions, so the bunch reads as one object with variation inside it.
On a rushed batch one head is mostly blue, the next mostly yellow, and a third has taken almost nothing at all. Individually each looks fine. Together they look like leftovers.
The same applies to the number of colours per head. Three well-defined sectors on every stem beats five faint ones on some and two on others, and a good florist will trade brightness for that kind of agreement across a bunch.
What a good single stem looks like
Stripes begin at the base of the petal and run to the edge, following the veins, because that is the direction water travels. Colour that stops in a straight line across a petal, or pools in a round patch, came from somewhere other than the stem.
Sectors should meet cleanly. A narrow blend where two colours touch is normal and rather attractive; a muddy brown band where three have run together means the flower stood in solution too long.
The centre tells you the rest. Inner petals are always paler, since dye reaches them last, and a completely white core with strong outer colour means the bunch was pulled early.
Brown spotting on the coloured areas is the one fault worth rejecting outright.
The stem, and what to check underneath
Lift the wrapping and look at the bottom of the stems. The split is usually hidden by tape or a wrap, which is ordinary practice, but the cut itself should be firm and pale rather than soft and dark.
Length matters more than it does with a plain rose. Cutting has to happen above the split, so a stem that was divided halfway up leaves very little room for a fresh cut later in the week.
Ask which method was used if the colour looks unusually even, because a sprayed rose behaves differently from a stem-dyed one and marks damp hands.
Ordering with all that in mind
Fewer stems of a well-matched batch beat a large bunch assembled from whatever came through. Rainbow roses are bought for the effect they make in the first minute, and an uneven bunch spends that minute being examined rather than admired.
If the flowers are travelling to a party in Johannesburg where they will be photographed in a group, agree the colour balance in advance and accept that the second delivery will never match the first exactly.
