What’s Happening Behind Your Mirrors
At Harkraft, we usually focus on giving you concrete tips and pointers as how to best remodel your home, but this article is a bit of a departure from that. While it’s always good to know how to go about organizing and remodeling your home, it’s just as good to know the reasoning behind it. In this post, we’ll take a look at how mirrors are constructed, and why they have the effect in your home that they do.
Thousands of Years Ago…
The earliest mirrors were just reflections in things like water and shiny objects, like those made from obsidian. Some of the earliest recordings of mirrors were around 6000BC in what’s now known as Turkey, while polished stone mirrors came around 4,000 years later. But the most recognizable form of today’s mirrors—metal and glass—made their appearance in the first century AD.
Fast forward hundreds and hundreds of years to 1835, when Justus von Leibig invented the silvered-glass mirror, which is a fancy way of saying it’s coated with a reflective substance. Because of his innovation, mirrors became advanced enough to undergo widespread manufacturing, and silvering is now seen with today’s mirrors.
Types of Mirrors Seen Today
Although there are many different shapes and sizes to mirrors, they essentially come in one of five forms:
Why They Work So Well in Your Home
Even when mirrors first came into being thousands of years ago, they weren’t just used to look at oneself. People figured out pretty quickly that mirrors could be manipulated for light and aesthetic purposes, and easily brighten up spaces (an important concept when electricity wasn’t around to fill in the blanks).
And now, even though we have electricity, we still use mirrors and their reflective properties in the home to brighten up spaces and make rooms look bigger. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to position a mirror across from the door, at the end of a long hallway, or tilted to catch the sun. This allows the mirror to catch the most amount of light possible, and reflect it back into the room.
If you need more tips or ideas on how to strategically place mirrors around your home, be sure to visit our mirrors section on the Harkraft blog, too.
