Humans have used mirrors for more than 6,000 years. So you would think that our species has a basic understanding of how reflections work.
We don’t. That’s why social media accounts amass hundreds of thousands of followers by compiling unintentionally silly and downright embarrassing photos posted by mirror resellers.
Every day on resale platforms such as Facebook Marketplace, Depop and Etsy, people who are looking to make money off their grandmothers’ vanity tables or their bedroom décor forget that their reflections are making the listings look ridiculous. Along with their mirrors, these secondhand sellers inadvertently advertise strange shadows, oblivious pets and disembodied limbs. Though the giggle-inducing listings may not be driving big sales, they have become wildly popular content.
Nick Mao, 54, a comedian in Newcastle, England, kept finding funny mirror photos online and, back in 2018, no one else seemed to know about the weird world of mirror advertisements. So he started an X account, @SellingAMirror, and posted the funniest ones he found.
“We all love a fail,” Mr. Mao said. Like his standup bits, he didn’t know if anyone else would find the content funny until he started putting it out there.
“Maybe I’m just weird,” Mr. Mao recalled thinking in a recent interview. “But I was like, ‘No, man! This is funny. Surely this is funny. Someone’s got to find this funny.’”
And people did. Users flocked to his comments sections and thousands of followers joined his mirror picture community. At around the same time in 2018, Can Kurt, 25, now a graduate student at a university near Copenhagen, also stumbled upon these funny mirror sale pictures and posted them on his Facebook group called “Pictures of people selling mirrors.”
Today, Mr. Kurt’s page has more than 350,000 followers. That’s a huge following for a private Facebook group. For context, a widely known public group for housing in New York City called “NYC Sublets & Apartments” has 40,000 fewer members.
Mr. Mao’s posts regularly accrue millions of views and dozens of comments, often from empathetic followers who acknowledge that they, too, struggle to take the perfect mirror pic.
“You get people saying, ‘It’s impossible to not get yourself in a reflection,’” he said with a sarcastic laugh. “It’s eminently possible. Just step to the side. That’s it.”
But maybe Mr. Mao was oversimplifying things. Maybe taking a picture of a mirror while avoiding a silly or distorted background was not so easy (even Hollywood directors have to employ clever tricks for mirror scenes).
OK fine … maybe it’s harder than it looks.
On the third floor of The New York Times headquarters in Manhattan, Jessica Pettway, a photographer who has worked for The Times, and I, Hank Sanders, try to advertise a mirror without becoming a meme.
At first, it seems easy. Don’t be in the shot and make sure the background is not distracting or casting disorienting shadows. Simple enough, right? Not so fast.
We prop up the hand-held mirror, snap a photo and check the results. The molding on the wall of the conference room reflects oddly in the image. OK, try again. But this time, the corner of the television is jutting out, giving the appearance that half of the mirror is missing.
Take it again — this time with the reflection showing the plain, white ceiling. But the lights from the ceiling are shining back, highlighting the smudges on the mirror. It is also impossible to tell how big the mirror is, so we have to add something for scale.
At the beginning of the quest to capture the finest mirror image, Ms. Pettway and I believed it would be an easy, fast endeavor. Thirty minutes later, and a professional photographer was still struggling to take a mirror photo sans embarrassment.
During the process, Ms. Pettway learned four tips for mirror picture excellence.
1) Check the background and tidy up behind the mirror.
2) For scale, have something next to the mirror like a hand, a limb or a pet.
3) Clean the mirror.
4) Don’t be in the picture (consider stepping to the side or adjusting the angle).
Of course, Mr. Mao’s and Mr. Kurt’s followers rely on people not following those rules. Mirror fails are good clean (or sometimes smudged) fun that provide a window into homes all over the world.
And maybe mirror fails are more than a meme.
“It’s just people not being quite in control of the situation,” Mr. Mao said, “and that’s always funny.”
