As I recall, the "Vampires have no reflection" stemmed from mirrors of the time usually being polished silver. So, I guess the vampire can do this if they're okay with having silver pressed up against their face.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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How does that guy with smoke coming out of his eye patch always know when I'm sneaking up on him?? At night. While he's screaming.
Clearly, because he's part bat, the screaming is a kind of echolocation.
Tbf the silver is behind the layer of glass
Pretty sure they just poured silver nitrate over glass. You can still buy kits to do that to re-silver old mirrors for the original look. From what I can find, the layered ones were older, and they used tin and mercury which made breaking a mirror a rather unlucky event.
I'm sure there are varying methods, but typically you silver the back of glass to make a mirror
I think you are right. I keep finding different ways they did it, so sounds like the 1800s was a busy period in the development of mirror technology!
Huh, so 7 years bad luck was actually just heavy metal poisoning? Fascinating...
I always heard it was about not having a soul.
Can confirm. I'm not a vampire but I sold my soul for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos back im 6th grade. Since then I haven't seen my reflection or been able to use an automatic door.
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Mirrors now are chemically deposited silver to my knowledge.
Deposited on the back of the glass, then a protective layer applied on top. The amount of silver in that assembly is very low, and none is exposed, but the reflective component is the silver.
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You can easily solve this with a little padding around the edges.
Would this work? I think the light stops at the mirror because it's silver.
Normally
- Light hits the vampire.
- It bounces off their body.
- It hits the mirror
- It reflects from the mirror into your eyes.
Silver mirror
- Light hits the vampire.
- It bounces off their body (now unholy light)
- It hits the mirror and gets absorbed
- Light doesn't make it to your eyes
So, technically, there really should be a vampire-shaped hole in the mirror where the vampire was.
Not enough research to support this claim.
Studies seem to show that onlookers see a reflection of everyone and everything BUT the vampire without any vampire-shaped losses of light showing up on the objects behind the vampire; as evidenced in Brooks’s 1995 documentary. Also important to note is that the vampire's shadow is also missing from the mirror's reflection, but it's visible when viewing the vampire directly.
From the same documentary, we learn that vampires do have shadows, but it raises doubts as to if the vampire casts a shadow of their own; this could instead be evidence that a vampire's shadow is an entirely sentient entity somehow tied to the vampire's corporeal form.
Based on this, I believe that we'd need more research into the existence and form of a vampire's shadow and the possibility that the silver of a mirror wholly negates or even rejects unholy light. Before making such baseless and reckless claims, you consider how your own xenophobic and, frankly, teraphobic or demonophobic biases are likely hurting members of the inmortua community.
Thank you for this serious research 🙏
I'm nothing if not dangerously committed to incredibly bad science
Hence the username.
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The idea that light has a binary property of holy versus unholy is pretty funny. You could probably exploit this to do computing.
COMPUTERS ARE VAMPIRES?!
The world is a vampire. Computers are part of the world. Therefore, computers are vampires.
inb4 arbitrary code execution poc on github
Will you DM a game for me?
You have added The Unholy Spectroscope to your inventory.
The concept of unholy light seems to imply vampires can be detected through unholy spectroscopy.
If I’m standing next to a vampire and give them the shirt off my back, does my shirt turn invisible in the mirror when they put it on?
If a vampire gives me their shirt, at what point does it become visible in the mirror?
What if the vampire is wearing a rope- can they spool out a hundred feet of mirror-invisible rope as long as some is on their body?
I feel there’s a ton of applications for vampires- optics use mirrors a lot, can they wear a vehicle/tank/ship/etc and make it invisible to optics that utilize mirrors?
Well, if we treat incoming light as a quantum superposition:
|light⟩ = α|holy⟩ + β|unholy⟩
...and assume that vampires reflect only unholy light and absorb holy light, then anything directly part of the vampire’s "system" filters light this way.
So I guess the question becomes, "How does the filtering happen?" Is it by physical surface, or is there some kind of quantum holiness field that absorbs holy light nearby?
So if sunlight hurts vampires, but moonlight doesn't (but moonlight is reflected sunlight) then does that mean the moon absorbs all holy light, and only reflects unholy light? Sunlight, we must assume, is composed of a random mix of all wavelengths and divinities of light. Therefore, can a vampire's reflection be seen if the vampire is illuminated by moonlight? Only if using a non-silver mirror? What about office fluorescent light, the most evil light of all?
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The better solution
Bicycle vamps
Do vampires cast a shadow? Because if they cast a shadow, would they actually be able to see through themselves in a mirror, or would they just see a big void in the shape of their body as the light from behind them hits their body but not the mirror? 🤔
Idk about vampire lore but if they are invisible in mirror it means light passes through them undisturbed and therefore they shouldn't cast a shadow. But with the same logic they would be invisible altogether so it being exclusive to mirrors is a wild thing...
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This belongs in What We Do In The Shadows.
I thought all of their clothes disappear in mirrors, too. Or what about water that they're drinking...
Vampires drink blood, not water...
Surely, they must take in fluids besides blood, right? Otherwise they'd shrivel up!
Actually when irl blood feeders (such as vampire bats) feed, they need to constantly keep pissing while sucking blood, so as not to burst from the volume of liquid they're feeding off of.
Because blood is relatively nutrition poor. Just mostly water with an irony taste. (Uh.. I wouldn't know personally ofc. Uhm, a friend told me. A human friend, as all we humans have.)
Blood is mostly water.
Vampires also have ultra instance senses, so they don't need to look.behind them
Something a vampire-hunter might say 🤔
I'll keep this in mind if I ever become a vampire.
Can someone please put a vampire in a Michelson interferometer and see what happens?
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