As I recall, the “Vampires have no reflection” stemmed from mirrors of the time usually being polished silver. So, I guess the vampire can do this if they’re okay with having silver pressed up against their face.
Tbf the silver is behind the layer of glass
Pretty sure they just poured silver nitrate over glass. You can still buy kits to do that to re-silver old mirrors for the original look. From what I can find, the layered ones were older, and they used tin and mercury which made breaking a mirror a rather unlucky event.
I’m sure there are varying methods, but typically you silver the back of glass to make a mirror
I think you are right. I keep finding different ways they did it, so sounds like the 1800s was a busy period in the development of mirror technology!
Huh, so 7 years bad luck was actually just heavy metal poisoning? Fascinating…
I always heard it was about not having a soul.
Can confirm. I’m not a vampire but I sold my soul for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos back im 6th grade. Since then I haven’t seen my reflection or been able to use an automatic door.
Good myths have multiple ramifications
Mirrors now are chemically deposited silver to my knowledge.
Deposited on the back of the glass, then a protective layer applied on top. The amount of silver in that assembly is very low, and none is exposed, but the reflective component is the silver.Most use aluminium nowadays afaik.
I’m not certain, can’t find any reliable info on this.
Shops don’t seem to specify the reflective material. In addition, aluminium is commonly used to describe the frame, and silver as a color for the frame or other parts, making it hard to get any info on the sales side.On the production-tech side, I see some pages talk only about silver, others mention both silver and aluminium. Silver commonly has a description of the chemical process at times (silver nitrate silvering), haven’t seen one for aluminium yet.
Price wise, metal should be fully opaque around 10nm. Assuming a generous 100nm thickness, that makes 0.1€/m² worth of silver. I doubt material cost is a factor.
Performance wise, silver seems better than aluminium in its reflectance. Honestly I don’t get why anyone would be making aluminium mirrors.
Does anyone have more info on this?
This is the most thorough answer I managed to find so far. They do mention silver being more valuable, but seems like the application process might be more expensive also.
The only source I could find on commonality is this paywalled market report claiming “The market is segmented by application (home and commercial) and type (aluminized and silvered glass mirrors), with silvered glass mirrors currently holding a larger market share due to their superior reflectivity and clarity.” Not sure whether greater market share necessarily means more individual mirrors produced though. But sounds like silver still reigns supreme despite higher costs, though not sure by how much.
You can easily solve this with a little padding around the edges.
Do vampires cast a shadow? Because if they cast a shadow, would they actually be able to see through themselves in a mirror, or would they just see a big void in the shape of their body as the light from behind them hits their body but not the mirror? 🤔
Idk about vampire lore but if they are invisible in mirror it means light passes through them undisturbed and therefore they shouldn’t cast a shadow. But with the same logic they would be invisible altogether so it being exclusive to mirrors is a wild thing…
I always thought the lore was that they could not see themselves in a mirror and that was misinterpreted as they did not have a reflection. First one could just be a mental block or they just don’t recognize their reflections as themselves.
yeah that would really make much more sense than the other one
Ummm… Because shadows aren’t a solid mass. They’re just where light isn’t. So even in a case where a vampire casts a shadow, it wouldn’t matter, mirrors still work in the dark.
Mirrors work by reflecting light. If the light isn’t passing through the vampire from behind to hit the mirror, it cannot reflect it. If a vampire casts a shadow, this implies that light does not pass through them. For them to not reflect in a mirror, but still be able to see what is behind them, light would need to pass through their body, which would mean they also would not cast a shadow.
Right, I get what you’re saying. So I guess you’d have to fall back on the lore… There’s some that says they don’t cast shadows, some that do, and if you consider Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he’s able to control his shadow.
Then I guess also the lore for why they don’t have reflections comes into play? Either because the mirror is coated in silver, which destroys their reflection, or because the mirror reflects the soul, and vampires don’t have souls.I dunno, I guess it all depends which mythos you want to follow and just how much you’re willing to ignore basic physics.
We could say that vampires don’t have a material body and they just alter the wavelength of light that passes through them to project a living form towards the eyes of living observers. That way they could be visible without having a reflection.
Then they could give themselves a shadow by shifting the visible light from bright light sources into infrared or ultraviolet instead of blocking it as material objects do.
mirrors still work in the dark.
I mean, do they? Mirrors reflect light. If there’s no light then there’s nothing for the mirror to do.
This is like saying a water wheel works without water. No it doesn’t, it just sits there.
The better solution
Bicycle vamps
Would this work? I think the light stops at the mirror because it’s silver.
Normally
- Light hits the vampire.
- It bounces off their body.
- It hits the mirror
- It reflects from the mirror into your eyes.
Silver mirror
- Light hits the vampire.
- It bounces off their body (now unholy light)
- It hits the mirror and gets absorbed
- Light doesn’t make it to your eyes
So, technically, there really should be a vampire-shaped hole in the mirror where the vampire was.
If I’m standing next to a vampire and give them the shirt off my back, does my shirt turn invisible in the mirror when they put it on?
If a vampire gives me their shirt, at what point does it become visible in the mirror?
What if the vampire is wearing a rope- can they spool out a hundred feet of mirror-invisible rope as long as some is on their body?
I feel there’s a ton of applications for vampires- optics use mirrors a lot, can they wear a vehicle/tank/ship/etc and make it invisible to optics that utilize mirrors?
Well, if we treat incoming light as a quantum superposition:
|light⟩ = α|holy⟩ + β|unholy⟩…and assume that vampires reflect only unholy light and absorb holy light, then anything directly part of the vampire’s “system” filters light this way.
So I guess the question becomes, “How does the filtering happen?” Is it by physical surface, or is there some kind of quantum holiness field that absorbs holy light nearby?
So if sunlight hurts vampires, but moonlight doesn’t (but moonlight is reflected sunlight) then does that mean the moon absorbs all holy light, and only reflects unholy light? Sunlight, we must assume, is composed of a random mix of all wavelengths and divinities of light. Therefore, can a vampire’s reflection be seen if the vampire is illuminated by moonlight? Only if using a non-silver mirror? What about office fluorescent light, the most evil light of all?
Will you DM a game for me?
You have added The Unholy Spectroscope to your inventory.
The concept of unholy light seems to imply vampires can be detected through unholy spectroscopy.
The idea that light has a binary property of holy versus unholy is pretty funny. You could probably exploit this to do computing.
inb4 arbitrary code execution poc on github
COMPUTERS ARE VAMPIRES?!
The world is a vampire. Computers are part of the world. Therefore, computers are vampires.
I always thought it was a quantum effect: light is passing through the vampire and bouncing on it at the same time and it’s only when you observe its predicted path that you’ll project it in a defined state.
But, from your point of view, light “knew” from the beginning that it had to pass through the vampire or bounce on it.
I don’t think the light “knew” from the beginning. The light started in a state of superposition, right? Both unholy and holy. Once it hits the vampire, only the unholy light is reflected, acting like a sort of filter similar to a polarizing lens.
I thought all of their clothes disappear in mirrors, too. Or what about water that they’re drinking…
Vampires drink blood, not water…
Surely, they must take in fluids besides blood, right? Otherwise they’d shrivel up!
Actually when irl blood feeders (such as vampire bats) feed, they need to constantly keep pissing while sucking blood, so as not to burst from the volume of liquid they’re feeding off of.
Because blood is relatively nutrition poor. Just mostly water with an irony taste. (Uh… I wouldn’t know personally ofc. Uhm, a friend told me. A human friend, as all we humans have.)
Blood is mostly water.
This belongs in What We Do In The Shadows.
Can someone please put a vampire in a Michelson interferometer and see what happens?
I’ll keep this in mind if I ever become a vampire.
A hall of mirrors would be hell for a vampire to navigate.
Nah. It’d be like it is on a poorly made video game.
Oh that handsome little devil.
Pretty sure your eyes can’t focus on anything that close. Nice try
Try it out. Take a mirror, put it very close to your eye but angled sideways, since you can obviously not look through your head.
You will have no issues at all focussing on what you are looking at, since you aren’t looking at the mirror at all.
You can also try that while looking at yourself through a dirty mirror. You can either focus on the dirt on the mirror or on your face. You can’t see both the dirt and your face in focus at the same time.
I had a pair of glasses that had mirrors on the far sides of them and they worked rather well.
