A mirror on your screen

Why does a mirror flip the image?

A mirror reverses the image from left to right: if you raise your right hand, your reflection raises the hand on its left side. Since that's how you see yourself every day, it's the face that feels familiar to you. But no face is perfectly symmetrical: the part in your hair, a mole, a smile that's slightly stronger on one side. That's why people often think they look "weird" in photos, because the camera shows the true view. The online mirror shows a flipped image by default, like a real mirror; the "True view" button turns it the right way round. Text held up to the camera reads normally in true view, and backwards in mirror mode.

Check how you look before a video call or an interview

Before a video interview, a telehealth appointment or an important meeting, a few seconds in front of the online mirror are enough to check your hair, outfit and background. Switch to true view: that's the image the other people receive, while many video call apps show you a flipped image of yourself. Look at the lighting too: a window behind you puts your face in shadow, so it's better to face it. If the room is dark, the ring light adds soft light to your face, white or warmer as you prefer. To check that the camera itself works properly, use "Webcam Test"; for your microphone, "Mic Test".

A mirror always in your pocket

On a phone, the online mirror replaces a compact mirror: use the front camera to see yourself, and the back camera to look at a hard-to-reach spot, behind a piece of furniture or under a sink for example. The zoom helps with putting in contact lenses, doing your makeup, getting something out of your eye or trimming a beard. The ring light turns the screen into a light source, useful in a car at night or a poorly lit room; it works best with screen brightness turned all the way up. If you want to keep an image, take a photo and download it as a PNG. Nothing else is kept: there's no video recording and nothing is sent to a server.