Dressing Room Mirrors

SANITY ON BACKORDER

From Hive Peak Boulevard

By Danu Marche

Humor Columnist

Published: June 11, 2025

Synapse & Spectacle

⸻

The Insulting Honesty of Dressing Room Mirrors – who approved that lighting?

I went into a store to buy a sweater and came out questioning the concept of human dignity.

You know the drill: you step into the dressing room, expecting a private moment of fashion evaluation. Instead, you’re thrust under a lighting rig apparently designed by a coroner with an artistic side hustle. It’s like the bulbs are set to “autopsy chic,” illuminating pores you didn’t know existed and highlighting skin tones that have never been observed in nature.

I swear my reflection whispered, “Sweetheart, we need to talk,” before audibly sighing.

Somewhere, there’s a meeting where someone approved this lighting. I picture a group of executives gathered around a table, nodding gravely as one says, “What we want is a hue that makes even supermodels consider returning their own faces. If we can cause at least one existential crisis per fitting session, we’ve succeeded.”

And the mirrors — oh, the mirrors. They have that funhouse-level distortion where you can see both every individual eyelash and the outline of your spleen. I leaned in once and caught a glimpse of a mood I haven’t processed since the late ’90s. If this is what they’re doing for fashion retail, I can only imagine what dental office mirrors are up to when we’re not looking.

Halfway through my internal TED Talk on “Lighting as Psychological Warfare,” I pivoted to the truly dangerous part: deciding whether to buy something while I still had this mirror-induced self-esteem deficit. That’s when the sweater I was holding transformed from “cozy” to “this is what they’ll bury me in when my last will specifies I don’t care anymore.”

For the record, I did buy the sweater — out of spite. My reflection didn’t deserve to win.

And yes, a squirrel saw all of this. Today’s sighting: perched on the shopping cart return rack outside, holding what looked like a compact mirror. Every few seconds it’d tilt the thing, studying its own reflection, then glance up at me as if to say, “See? It’s not just you.” Then it shoved the mirror under its arm and sprinted into the hedges, presumably to file away its own grievance.

This is the part where you’d expect me to blame society or unrealistic beauty standards, but no — I’m blaming wattage. If you want people to shop happily, light them like you’re filming a rom-com, not an alien autopsy. Soft gold glow, slightly blurry edges, maybe a small choir in the background.

Of course, the callback to my earlier logic is that bad lighting works. You buy more clothes, not because they look good now, but because you believe they might look good later — under the merciful glow of any other bulb in existence.

So, until dressing rooms stop doubling as interrogation cells, I’ll be shopping with sunglasses, a flashlight, and possibly that squirrel’s compact.

“If your local store has mirrors that make you more attractive, please send directions. And maybe a sweater. Mine’s already making funeral arrangements.”

©2025 Danu Marche