mirror mirror on the wall?

Alright, i have been pondering this question for a while. What color or colors is a mirror? does the mirror posess the color of whatever it is mirroring? or does it have its own spectrum of color that is hidding from us?

Honestly, I think that a mirror is silver. Look it up in an encyclopedia. I swear that I saw how you make a mirror and one layer of it is silver.

But, the beauty of a mirror is that it doesn't have anything, metaphorically speaking. It just reflects whatever is looking into it. That is the attraction of a mirror to Taoist thought. If a person is like a mirror, then they are empty, only reflecting what other people are.

um jali the encyclopedia said that a mirror is made of glass, so what color is glass? if we find this out then we would have the color of a mirror.. lol

Wow - what a question. Never thought about it. But I would have to say that no - the surface of the mirror has no color at all, that is why it reflects light off.

Alright okcitykid, i told you guys i have pondered this question for quite sometime, so if a mirror that is made from glass reflects light.Then what color is light? the only explanation that seams reasonalbe is windupnostr... that nothing has color.

the mirror reflects light because light does not have it's colour in it's 'armory'. It could well be that there are various other colours that exist but we can't see them because light is not made up of them.
However, yes maybe nothing has a colour, light gives things their colours.

What is wierd is that a glass mirror is actually a liquid!
Some mirrors are simply highly polished metal and they can be just as reflective. Mirrors are indeed mysterious- anyone seen the end of the movie "Prince of Darkness" or "Candyman"
Aside from that mirors are glas painted silver on one side then covered in black to stop any translucency.
Windows as mirrors are intersting as well. how in the daytime the inside is darker and you can't see in while at night it is lighter within and you can't see out. So if you stand in front of the window naked chose your time wisely.

its like this, a "color" is simply a frequency of light. your eye reads each frequency differently and thus you see different colors. a mirror simply deflects the frequencies instead of absorbing them so when you look at a mirror you see whatever the mirror "sees" .... im pretty sure it works somewhat like that, without getting all technical heh. feel free to correct me tho, i could be wrong.

Yeah wyote is right.
A lesson on lights and colors. (Because I felt like researching this stuff.)

Why is a mirror reflecting?

Because the material in the mirror(not the glass but the silver or whatever you are using lets just say silver) has a high reflecting property. The exact reason for the propert goes into optical physics which I don't know. This high reflecting property and the fact that the silver is smooth makes the light bounce off the silver, and this is why a mirror reflects.

Why is there glass in a mirror?

Early mirrors actually didn't have glass in them. The glass just acts as something to protect the silver and hold it into place.

Why is something a certain color?

The reason something is a color is because it has a low reflecting property and it has pigments within it. So an obect that is red means that that objects has a pigment for all forms of light except red, and the red light is reflected back at your eyes which see it as red.

So with all this information I would conclude that a mirror has no color. I wouldn't say it is the color of the object it reflects because really that is the color of the object, not the mirror. But if you could give me some reasons why it could be the color of what it reflects, I would probably agree easily.

This site had some cool things on light and the atomosphere and such.
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter4/reflection.html

Not to down what you were saying but as photogrpher, I would disagree about a couple of points.
Color of reflected light is intensive (shaded) by the object color frequency. A red object reflects (absorbs) those frequencies just as the red plastic transmits more of the red frequencies. As to the color of the mirror, I would have to say silver, as the glass was plated with silver to manufacture mirrors originally.

Mirrors are a very shiny silver imho.