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Asked by tkidner to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
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Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:
We already got asked a really good question about colour which raised the point that colour isn’t necessarily an actual part of an object. So a mirror is the colour of whatever is reflected in it!
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Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:
What a great question. Mirrors reflect all the light which bounces off them – so they’re whatever colour the light which hits them is. We only see coloured objects because they absorb some of the light and only reflect part of it – for example red things only reflect red light, and that’s why they look red. If you shine a blue lamp on a red T-shirt it’ll look black because there is no red light to be reflected, and black is what we call an object which doesn’t reflect any (or much) light at all.
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Nazim Bharmal answered on 16 Mar 2012:
Mirrors can reflect just parts of the spectrum, which is why they sometimes appear to have colour, and that is described as ‘tinted’. When I was young, this was very common and you got at home grey mirrors (reflecting every colour, but only some of it), gold mirrors (reflecting mainly reds and yellows), and even blue and green tinted ones (not so pretty).
However, since mirrors reflect light, the colour you see from them also depends on what the colour light has. We use special mirrors (dielectrics) in our experiments that are designed to reflect just one colour, and if the light doesn’t have that colour then these mirrors can look black (no light at all).
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Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:
Ooh a good one!
The colour of something depends on the colour of light that it either emits, transmits or reflects.A mirror doesn’t emit, or give out any light, so it could be colourless
It doesn’t transmit, or let any colour through, so it could be black
But it reflects all the light shone onto it, and when you add them up that will equal white!
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