Mirrors

For my second SBC, I chose a play called No Exit. In this story, there are 3 characters stuck in a room together and basically annoy each other until the end. Quite a few times in the story, there were instances where the characters couldn't see their own reflections. It happened especially with this one woman, who was pretty obsessed with her appearance and wanted someone else to look at her and be her talking mirror when she couldn't find a physical one. 

When I read that, this old, and super random, saying popped into my mind: people see themselves (like in a mirror) 5 times prettier than they how others see them. But, obviously, we can't quantify beauty. I have no idea how that rumor came about, so I searched it up and found mixed opinions.

From what I read, it's mostly a matter of self-confidence and familiarity. For sure, there's plenty of people out there who are self-conscious about their appearance, but various websites I browsed through also said that the mere-exposure effect - which is when you start liking something once you get comfortable with seeing it so often - possibly contributes to the reason why some see themselves much prettier than what others think. Applying that effect, it means that we see ourselves in the mirror every day and get used to it, maybe coming up to a point where we like our appearance a lot.

In reality, the reason that one woman couldn't see her reflection is that she lived her whole life with a mirror always by her side, defining herself highly only according to her own standards. She was forced to be re-defined through other people's perspectives of her, revealing the uncovered truth that she couldn't accept that easily.

Before I give away the rest of the story...I guess, mirrors really could go either way and be our friends or foes. They can boost our self-confidence, but it could blind us from the truth sometimes. Either way, there's no way to truly define beauty since we all have our own standards. And of course, everyone's beautiful in their own way, and no one's life needs to depend on any mirror to define who they are.