Summer Friday: Why Do Brides Toss the Bouquet?

The tradition goes way back, and it wasn't just for weddings

There’s a scene in the movie 27 Dresses where Katherine Heigl’s character, Jane — a woman who has been a bridesmaid more times than she can count — positions herself near the back at a bouquet toss. When the bride throws her flowers, the bouquet sails right toward Jane… well, if you haven’t watched it, let’s not spoil the fun for you.

The version most people picture — single women lined up, the bride pivoting away, the bouquet sailing backward over her shoulder — is a relatively recent version of the tradition, with somewhat murky origins.

Let’s start with the bouquets themselves. Carrying flowers at weddings likely goes all the way back to antiquity. In Roman weddings around 100 CE, the bride carried a bouquet of wheat, and the groom tossed nuts to male onlookers as the couple walked to their new home. Stalks of grain, herbs, and, later, flowers were all used in wedding ceremonies to symbolize the bride’s fertility.

The flowers-and-beauty version came later and took off in early 19th century England. Queen Victoria carried orange blossom and myrtle at her 1840 wedding to Prince Albert, and royal brides have included myrtle from that same plant in their bouquets ever since. As American weddings grew more formal and elaborate during the 19th century, so did bridal bouquets.

That explains where brides got the flowers, but not why they started throwing them. Since the 19th century, and maybe even earlier, people have been throwing something at weddings. An 1872 study on brides and wedding traditions mentioned throwing rice at weddings as a then-new custom.

Bouquet-tossing itself, though, wasn’t limited to weddings. Across the 19th century, throwing flowers was a familiar way to honor someone in public.

A typical scene played out in January 1850 at the Orleans Theater in New Orleans, where Verdi’s opera Jerusalem was making its city debut. According to The New Orleans Crescent, a Madame Devries “sang unusually well, and was, at the close of the first act, called forward and showered with bouquets” — a compliment the newspaper gushed about with pride.

That kind of scene was routine across the country. Theater audiences were hardly alone. Newspapers also described bouquets being thrown at military celebrations, political rallies, Mardi Gras parades, and other public festivities. During the Grand Review of the Armies in May 1865 — the victory parade in Washington after the Confederate surrender — The New York Times reported that “enthusiastic friends have showered bouquets and wreaths of laurel upon officers, men and horses.”

Whether the wedding bouquet toss grew out of this broader culture of floral tributes or developed independently is not clear. But these newspaper accounts make it clear that throwing of bouquets was not confined to weddings.

Tossing a bouquet at weddings has been a custom in the US since at least the 1930s, though the mechanics looked different then. A bride wrote to a newspaper columnist about when to throw her bouquet at her home wedding — “immediately after the ceremony, or just before leaving the house?” The columnist advised her to toss the flowers among the guests after she changed into her “going away” costume.

Other 1930s accounts describe brides tossing the bouquet specifically to members of the wedding party. At the 1937 wedding of Ethel du Pont and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., the bride, who stood at a second story gallery with the groom, tossed her bouquet of roses, sweet peas, and lilies to “the eager girls below.”

In the decades afterward, the tradition evolved. Photos from the 1950s show brides facing the female guests and tossing the bouquet forward to them. The backward toss may have become standard later just because it photographs better, according to wedding scholars Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Pleck.

And the over-the-shoulder toss may be distinctly American. The 1989 book A Dictionary of Superstitions, referring to an English wedding etiquette guide, notes that as late as 1963, the backward toss was “a rather charming American tradition that is not very widely adopted here [the UK] as yet.”

Mixed herbs including mint, thyme, and rosemary

Despite the hazy origins of the bouquet toss, the tradition has taken on a life of its own, no doubt helped along by Hollywood.

Films and television from the 1950s onward used the bouquet toss as a symbol of romantic possibility: who’s next? If you watched enough American sitcoms in the 1980s and 1990s, you definitely saw an episode where someone caught the bouquet who absolutely did not want to, usually with horrified or embarrassed facial expressions all around.

But here’s where the tradition stands today: it’s quietly fading.

According to wedding planning platform The Knot’s 2026 survey of thousands of recently married couples, only 24% had a bouquet toss at their reception.

One reason the tradition may be fading is an increased sensitivity to guests and their different life experiences. Movies and TV shows often feature a bevy of young unmarried women eager to lunge at the bouquet; in real life, one has to be conscious of divorced friends and relatives, widows, or women who do not want their relationship status advertised.

Still, though trends are moving away from the bouquet toss, the tradition survives because for those few moments, the toss commands near-total attention. There’s the laughter, the excitement, the anticipation, and perhaps the disappointment of whoever missed grabbing hold of the flying bouquet. But, above all, it’s fun.