A man admiring his reflection in the mirror. [Courtesy]
Before the invention of mirrors, people lived their entire lives without knowing how they looked like. People would take up the Identity of their religious groups. [Courtesy]
The closest anyone could come to see themselves was in a pool of water or on a shiny copper or bronze wear which reflected only 20 per cent of light thus giving reflections resembling silhouettes.
Perfect glass mirrors weren’t accessible to the public till the 19th century while mass production did not start till the 1850s. Before that, only rich merchants and nobles had access to the now-ubiquitous object found on phones as one takes selfies.
Even though the invention of the mirror came with a lot of fascination, it is its impact on how individuals viewed themselves that ushered a new era of “self”.
Creation of the self-identity
Without knowing one's looks, it can be imagined that the world had very few cases of low self-esteem based on facial appearance.
People saw themselves as part of a community, family, or religion. Your position and association in such groups shaped how you view yourself and, in most cases, people held group identities like being part of a religious group or clan.
How that clan or religious group was viewed by the soceity was the identity the individual memebers carried.
According to historians, the mirror played a crucial role in shaping how people saw themselves relative to the world for the first time. This partially led to the creation of individuality.
This can be seen in medieval autobiographies that were not about the author but his relationship with God or the community. At the time, writings never took the first-person approach. Monks and citizens who wrote biographies at the time would write about the community and emphasize the relationship of the community with God.
Artists also started self-portraits around the same time mirrors started being popular among the affluent personalities in areas such as Venice and Paris.
The very act of seeing oneself in a mirror encouraged a person to think of himself and the reflection of oneself gave him an identity leading to the develop the idea of being “unique”.
From the time people came to know how they look, they started comparing themselves with others and thus became the use of mirrors- to ensure that everything is right on the face, body, or clothes.
“Oh I look gorgeous, do I have small eyes, big nose, long ears, short hair, or do my eyelashes look funny.” It is the craze of many people who go on a wild inspection of themselves even though they have seen themselves thousands of times.
Even though Mirror brought in new needs such as personal adoration, people have continued having weird relationships with their reflection.
In everyday life, people avoid staring at their reflection for a more than split second, avoiding to activate their critical evaluation of their appearance. This is especially common in public settings.
In a private setting, however, people stare and adore themselves for minutes at a time savoring the areas they find captivating and beautiful.
According to Psychology Today, “reflections help us develop our sense of self”. Children begin to recognize their reflection as them at around 20 months, something that also happens in primates and dolphins as well.
Once the child sees itself, then the journey to build the image of self begins. Before the mirror, before people knew how they looked, the existence of self was something contrary to what we knew today.
How reflections can be tools to shift our perspective
Although many people use reflection for conscious evaluation of the physical self, reflections can also be used to improve how we view ourselves. Psychologists have argued that when someone looks at their reflection with the intention of being kind to self, it can improve how we see ourselves in the mirror and make us feel good about ourselves without criticizing the reflections looking back at us.
