What color are mirrors? The answer would seem to be silver for most mirrors,
but if mirrors are designed to reflect the colors of the objects facing it,
shouldn’t they appear to be without any colors of their own?
You might find some answers in this thread, where someone asked why we think of mirrors as silver.
This reply might fit better in the reference thread than this one. But this will do. I was very puzzled not to see the correct answer about why mirrors appear to be silver in the other thread, and that’s because mirrors are shiny. So if you look at the mirror resting on my mantel, you see the ceiling, which is painted a flat white color. It looks white. When it’s reflected in the mirror, however, it looks shiny because I’m looking at a piece of polished glass backed with silvering which reflects the HUE of the ceiling, but not the DULLNESS.
What color IS silver? It’s gray, but SHINY. Shiny materials have the property of reflection, which is the property that distinguishes silver from gray. So mirrors, because they reflect colors without imparting their own color, appear to have the same properties as silver (in many cases because you are actually LOOKING AT SILVER when you look at a mirror and vice-versa) and appear to be silver in color if you feel the need to identify the color.
Heh? How can you say that when you see the white ceiling in the mirror, we don’t see its dullness? The reflection of the ceiling does appear any more shiny than the real ceiling to me. (Think about the fact that it’s possible to have a mirror set up with the edges obscured so that it’s difficult to tell which object is the real one and which is the mirror image – one does not appear shinier than the other in a good mirror).
I think the answer to the color of the mirror basically comes down to terminology. We say “silver” because the color “silver” is generally associated with shiny things (i.e. polished silver). However, that’s not really the color of silver. Silver’s color is probably best described as gray, but most of the time, it’s very shiny, so we don’t see its color, but rather the color of other objects reflected in it. The color of a mirror is likewise probably gray, but it’s highly “polished” (smooth – maybe not actually through polishing), so we don’t actually see that color.