I have been wondering this since I was a child and it’s never been explained in a way I can understand.
I’m looking at my bathroom mirror and it looks silver. But how is that possible because it’s reflecting whatever is in front of it?
So when I look at the reflection of the towel in the mirror i see blue, when I see the reflection of the wall I see white, when I see the reflection of the shower curtain I see the color of the shower curtain. But when I look at the mirror as a whole it seems silver?
I think I have read that mirrors have silver backings which makes sense why I see silver. But I don’t understand how it’s possible to see the exact reflection of my bathroom but it’s also silver?
In: Other
Human brains are really good at reasoning out color properties of objects, despite differing environments. Like some red berries will look different at sunrise versus noon because of the different light hitting them, but it was important to the survival of humans to be able to realize it was the same substance.
So, we don’t *just* evaluate the color of the light that actually enters our eyes. There’s a secondary step of evaluating the environment around the object, to make adjustments to the perceived color. You can see this with optical illusions like [this one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion). In that example, we evaluate two squares of the same true color to be two *different* colors, because of how we interpret the surrounding light and shadows.
With that established, let’s consider reflections. Reflections aren’t a new invention, as natural reflective surfaces (like still lakes and puddles) are ubiquitous. So, we evolved to deal with those as well, and to realize that even if something was tinted a different color in a reflection because of how the material did not reflect all light with the same intensity, it wasn’t different from the original reflected object. Instead, we interpret the reflecting surface as having a particular color, which gets mixed with the original image.
If you look at a polished gold candlestick or something, the reality is that the light from other objects is reflected and we’re seeing that–but the gold alters the reflected light a bit, so we see different color components at different intensities. The way we model that in our brain is to think of that object as being *reflective* but also *gold* in color–although an intrinsic color really isn’t a thing that exists in reality. It’s a shortcut for our brains to process the world around us quickly and effectively.
So, what happens with a surface that reflects light rather evenly? Well, if it’s rough and scatters light randomly, we see it as a matte gray. If it is smooth and therefore reflective like a mirror, we can see the color of individual reflected objects clearly. But our brain, of course, works a certain way for evaluating reflected objects. We think, “the original color of the reflected object is this, and in the mirror it’s this…which is basically the same…So what color does that make the mirror?” And the answer is, the same color as a rough surface that reflects light evenly across the spectrum, or in other words: gray.
So it’s not exactly that the mirror *is* gray, or any specific color. But our brains want to assign a color to it so that we can internally model what we are seeing, and the color that works correctly for that purpose is gray.
Latest Answers