Looks fake immediately out of the box, but once put it all together and fluff, it looks pretty real. Easy installation I appreciate that you don’t have to add each branch individually. My one sadness is that the bottom branches don’t have as much of the life like quality to them. That’s the only improvement I could think of! And if the “trunk” were a bit more realistic looking. Not sure how to achieve that however, so for the price, this gives the look I was hoping for! Not too full, but not to sparse. Elegant. Many friends and family men were thought it was real until we pointed out that it wasn’t!