Vanity Mirror

It’s happened to everyone. You’re sitting on a bus in morning traffic and realized you’ve forgotten to shave or to brush your teeth. Or a police car cruises up beside yours just when your mobile phone starts ringing. Well, the Vanity Mirror will allow you to these things and more, surreptitiously, at least with one half of your head.

The Vanity Mirror kit has only two parts, a thin plastic two-sided mirror 40cm x 40cm (16“ x 16”) and a 2.5cm x 1m (1” x 39”), soft metal strip with a sharp edge along its length. First, starting at the collarbone, carefully press and form the strip against the contours of your face: chin, lips, nose, etc., creating a silhouette of your profile. Place the silhouette, with the sharp edge down, on the mirror and hit the flat edge repeatedly over its length with a hammer, creating a mirror with your profile cutout. Placing this mirror over the middle of your head causes viewers to only see half your face and its reflection, but to believe they are seeing its entirety.

So next time you feel a severe itch in your right nostril, or you want to give someone the finger and make half a face without being seen, simple pull on the Vanity Mirror, get in the right-hand lane (or the window seat on the right-hand side of the bus/train) and behave antisocially without anyone being the wiser. Likewise, if you want to apply mascara to your left eye or there’s an abundance of wax in the left ear, just make sure all observers are on your right.

A small token of advice: looking towards or away from the mirror will make “you” look cross-eyed or walleyed, respectively.