• Question: What’s the colour of a mirror?

    Asked by anon-174272 to Alex, Carl, Hayley, Melanie, Tim, Yewande on 14 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Carl Barford

      Carl Barford answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      It has none.Colour is the reflected light, so if something is blue, it means it has absorbed the colours red, green and pushed back (reflected) the blue. Mirrors are made with silver over the top of glass; the metal shines most visible light back, and the glass gives it a solid, smooth surface to help

    • Photo: Yewande Oyekenu

      Yewande Oyekenu answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      A mirror has no colour. It is made from transparent clear glass with an opaque material used to cover one side for the other side to be reflective.

    • Photo: Melanie Hannah

      Melanie Hannah answered on 15 Jun 2018:

      It’s really difficult to make a good mirror. They are glass with a reflective coating on the back. The glass has to be perfectly clear, with no faults and no imperfections. Glass is actually a supercooled liquid, rather than a solid, so it flows towards gravity. You might see this effect in the windows of very very old houses.
      Mirrors can be made from highly polished and reflective metal, and these are in use in telescopes to focus the light that has been captured. These can appear to be coloured, depending on the metal used

    • Photo: Tim Craig

      Tim Craig answered on 19 Jun 2018:

      Mirrors reflect light, and as such, an ideal mirror doesn’t really have its own colour. However, nothing is perfect, so mirrors usually retain some of the colour of whatever material they are made from. In most cases, that is a silvery metallic colour.

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