The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I am the only thing that shows you your own face, and I get it backwards.
I swap left and right but never top and bottom.
For most of history I was polished metal, not glass.
Some households cover me when somebody dies.
Break me and legend promises seven years of bad luck.
Mirror
It does not reverse left and right at all — it reverses front and back. Your brain performs the swap, and gets the credit for the confusion.
For most of history mirrors were polished bronze, and the reflection was dim and yellow. Venice held the secret of glass backed with a tin-mercury amalgam for two centuries and treated its mirror-makers as state property; the process also poisoned them slowly. The modern silvered mirror comes from Justus von Liebig in 1835, and cheap glass followed. The confusion about left and right is not optical but linguistic: the mirror reverses along the axis facing it, and it is you who turn around. Only a handful of species — great apes, elephants, magpies, dolphins — recognise themselves in one.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #7 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #6. Next: mystery #8. Or try #51, #52, #53, #54, #55, #56.