The Mirror

As I was looking at myself in the mirror today, I had a thought. Is the mirror silver? I knew why it reflects and how we can see ourselves in it. But I really didn’t pay much attention to the colour of the mirror and alwasy assumed it to be silver. But is it?

What Is the Colour of a Mirror?

Foolish me! Obviously a mirror can’t be silver. The colour of a given object is determined by the colour it reflects. E.g., a red shirt is red because it reflects red and absorbs all other colours.
Mirrors are generally depicted as silver and probably that’s the reason most people assume the shiny objects to be silver in colour. Here is what I found when I googled mirror, as one can see most of them are silver:

A perfect mirror reflects everything. That’s the reason, mirrors can form images. As with everything else, the mirrors that are manufactured are far from perfect. A 2003 study by Raymond Lee and Javier Hernandes studied this particular question. They found that mirrors are slightly better at reflecting light of 510 nm wavelength (which corresponds to green). Thus, common mirrors are GREEN!

They have also suggested that this phenomenon can be observed in a virtual mirror tunnel.

Image source: PetaPixel

As one can see above, the images formed in the mirrors appear to gradually darken and have a slightly greenish tinge!
Here’s something for you to wonder: Do two parallel mirrors really form infinite images?