system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 how mirrors seem to be the color of what they are reflecting while also looking silver.

I have been wondering this since I was a child and it’s never been explained in a way I can understand.

I’m looking at my bathroom mirror and it looks silver. But how is that possible because it’s reflecting whatever is in front of it?

So when I look at the reflection of the towel in the mirror i see blue, when I see the reflection of the wall I see white, when I see the reflection of the shower curtain I see the color of the shower curtain. But when I look at the mirror as a whole it seems silver?

I think I have read that mirrors have silver backings which makes sense why I see silver. But I don’t understand how it’s possible to see the exact reflection of my bathroom but it’s also silver?
gpt
"Looking silver" is what we call surfaces that reflect their surroundings. It's not actually a color. So "seeming to be the color of what they're reflecting" and "looking silver" are one and the same thing, just different ways of describing the same appearance.

If you put a silver object in a uniformly illuminated room with blank walls it wouldn't "look silver", it would look like one uniform color. But that's a really contrived setup that "never" occurs in our day-to-day experience so we don't associate that with "looking silver."