I have a complicated relationship with mirrors, like so many women do. The message we’ve been given our entire lives is to look perfect, but when we strive to, we’re superficial; when we survey our progress, we’re narcissistic. For as long as I’ve had an iPhone, I’ve had a mirrored case on it—mostly just to make sure there’s nothing in my nose or teeth, but people always say the same thing when they see it. “You’re such a beauty editor.” Meaning: you care too much about beauty. And maybe I do. I grew up in Los Angeles, live in New York City, and write about plastic surgery every day of the week… it’s hard to know what a healthy amount of caring is.
What I do know is that my obsession with looking at myself—in Zoom meetings, in the 100-pound, full-length mirror I’ve dragged across state lines and to five different apartments because it’s so flattering, in my blindingly fluorescent Riki Loves Riki makeup mirror, in glass buildings everywhere—stems from insecurity, not vanity. Every mirror presents an opportunity for a pulse check: How well am I doing at this beauty thing today? Do these shorts cover my cellulite? Did I conceal the evidence of my skin picking well enough? Do I deserve to feel good about myself for a few hours? For as long as I can remember, my self-worth has been tied up in how I look.
But this year has changed that. I was watching TV the other night when that CoverGirl commercial with Maye Musk came on. “They say at a certain age, you just stop caring. I wonder what age that is.” I thought about how I’ve just stopped caring lately and how it doesn’t feel anything like giving up, as Musk implies. It feels like liberation. During lockdown, I watched as my weight went up 12 pounds, my Botox and cheek filler disappeared, my hair grew heavier and more shapeless, my nail polish chipped off and never got repainted… and I felt next to nothing about it all. It was fine.
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The pandemic removed the superfluous from our lives. Over these past seven months of not being able to wander into clothing shops and buy things I don’t need; not having to go to industry events I’d rather skip; not carrying a makeup bag around the city, just in case a guy asks me out last minute, I’ve never felt more at ease and in tune with myself. So it seemed like the right time to try something I’d been curious about and that, in normal times, would likely send me into a self-loathing spiral: True Mirror.
What is True Mirror?
At its most literal, True Mirror is a non-image-flipping mirror in a box frame, constructed by putting two front-surface mirrors together at right angles, without a seam down the center. (“Any two regular mirrors at right angles will create a non-reversed image, but you can’t make eye contact correctly because there is a big seam down the middle that goes right through your eyes,” explains founder John Walter. Eye contact, he says, is essential to getting the most out of this tool.) Most of us have never seen ourselves in a mirror of this sort, that doesn’t invert us front to back, which is why most of us have no idea what we really look like. That’s what makes True Mirror so unsettling.
How does True Mirror work?
When you hold up a piece of paper with, say (for the sake of symmetry), HIT written on it to face a regular mirror, the reflection shows you TIH. The mirror didn’t do that, though; you did when you turned the paper away from yourself. That’s easy to understand, but there’s a mental block when it comes to applying that same logic to our face. If you’re the only one who reads TIH, because anyone standing on the other side of the mirror, looking directly at you, would read the word HIT—then you’re also the only one seeing your face the way you’ve always seen it. When you see it as everyone else sees for the first time, it’s sort of like reading backward. You can still make out that it’s you, but it looks like you in a funhouse, and the visual message takes longer for your brain to process.
You can get an idea of what to expect with True Mirror by comparing a selfie of yourself taken in Instagram’s front-facing camera with one taken in the iPhone’s front-facing camera. The Instagram selfie is you flipped, so it’s closer to the you you see in your regular mirror. The iPhone selfie is you as you are (if you’re wearing a shirt with writing on it, you’ll be able to read it left to right). Chances are, you much prefer the Instagram version. I don’t like looking at my iPhone photo for more than a few seconds.
But a photograph doesn’t paint a completely accurate portrait of you either—you’re frozen in a single moment, distorted slightly in one way or another, depending on the lens and distance, with highlights and shadows that don’t register in real life. Because the True Mirror is in a box—you put your head in to view yourself from the front, left, and right all at once (versus a conventional mirror, which would require you to turn to see your sides)—it’s the closest you’ll ever get to interacting with yourself from the point of view of someone else, and it can be a pretty powerful experience.
I had been excited to try the mirror, but when it arrived, I didn’t take it out of the packaging for a couple of weeks. Now that it was in my living room, I wasn’t feeling so confident in my ability to handle seeing myself in a way I never had before. I kept making excuses—I’ll wait until this pimple goes away, until I’m feeling less vulnerable from my breakup, until I have a full face of makeup on. I expressed that to Walter in an email, and he responded honestly: “I’m afraid that you have a right to be nervous, and you should be in a good mindset for the first time. For many people, especially image-conscious people, the perception of asymmetry is overwhelming. It’s unfortunate, because it’s exaggerated—because things are on the opposite side [from what you’re used to seeing], they get doubled in your own perception.”
According to Walter, the point of the True Mirror is to see your authentic self, and to do that, you have to take the time to interact with yourself in it—smile, laugh, talk, reflect on what’s going on in your life, while looking at your eyes. “Your genuine smile always looks kind of fake or posed backward, which makes most people stop smiling. To me, this is a huge source of people’s negative self-esteem,” says Walter. “Everyone else expresses the full range of who they are every day to us, which is why we like and love them—or if we don’t, at least we have good reasons. But in mirrors, we stare at our static face and don’t get any of that good energy or charming personality.” He says that many people don’t look at themselves in the True Mirror long enough to adjust, but I decided to commit to this exercise of interacting with my image for at least 30 days, however cheesy it felt.
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My True Mirror experience
On a Friday night, with nowhere to go, I unpacked the mirror and braced myself for the worst. Walter was right about the asymmetry—my face seemed almost comically unbalanced. My whole head looked tilted, even though I was standing up straight. One eye seemed to be centimeters below the other. My smile was lopsided, my hair part was all wrong, and when I tried to wipe away a mascara smudge, my hand disobeyed me by reaching up to the wrong side. It was confusing and disorienting, but to my surprise, not totally horrifying. It took a few minutes, but I started to understand that if my features really were as dramatically askew as I perceived them, then at some point in my life, surely someone would have pointed it out.
If you get stuck in a negative mindset, Walter recommends switching back to your regular mirror and registering whatever asymmetry you see there. “It’s usually barely perceptible to you, just like we don’t really perceive it in others. Tell yourself that is what is actually there.” Then try the True Mirror again and focus on your eyes as you reflect on your current state. Think of it like mirror therapy: “How do you really feel about your skin? Your friend’s comments yesterday? Your career path? The protests? You watch yourself go through a thought process and see a being … in the [conventional] mirror, it’s like the messaging just stops after a few seconds and you just see a face,” he says.
I’d be the first to dismiss it all as New Age-y bs from a guy trying to sell his product, if I hadn’t given myself over to the weird process. I started sitting with the mirror while I was on phone calls with my mom and my best friend, watching myself as I talked with the people I’m most comfortable with. I did my makeup in it as I sang along to music. When my horse died, I cried in it. It took about two weeks for things to click in my brain and for me to see myself go from, as Walter describes it, “monstrously crooked” to something closer to “sparkly and beautiful.” I’ve always gotten compliments on my eyes, but I never thought of them as anything special until the True Mirror. Now I see them as rich, multidimensional, and sort of mysterious. As cliché as it is, they really do seem to light up when I’m animated.
I keep the True Mirror on a shelf in my living room, and I’m always caught off guard when I catch a glimpse of myself smiling or laughing from across the room—I look so much more carefree and genuine than I ever have in a regular mirror. I’ve dealt with depression and OCD for a long time, and even though it’s well-managed by medication, it’s always right there under the surface. But this year took the pressure off, dialed down the outside noise, and allowed me to be still—and that has reflected on my face. The True Mirror captures a warmth and a realness, which is why I’ve come to prefer it to other mirrors, even though it seems to highlight all the things I consider imperfections. Maybe I haven’t stopped caring about beauty; I’m just starting to see it completely differently for the first time.
