Salt Your Flowers?

I saw this tip in Real Simple and thought it was a little weird: to remove dust from artificial flowers, put some salt and your flowers in a paper bag then shake it. Now, I've got some fake flowers that have slowly but surely accumulated a pretty good coating of dust. I've tried micro-fiber cloths, vacuuming, shaking the daylights out of them...most of these techniques resulted in leaves and petals flying off and the dust staying put. SO, I thought I'd give the salt a shot. Suprisingly to me, it worked...worked beautifully...so beautifully in fact, I can't wait for another layer of dust to build up so I can do it again.