The Arched Full Length Mirror I Almost Did Not Order

The Antok arched mirror sat in my Amazon cart for eleven days. I would open the app, look at it, decide it was too much glass for a bedroom that nobody sees but Gary and me, and close it again. He finally said Rhonda either order it or stop talking about it, because he had heard the same speech three times. So I ordered it the first week of January, and then I worried about it for four days.

Here is what I had before. The bathroom mirror, which shows you from the collarbone up, and a small mirror screwed to the back of the closet door that was good for lipstick and nothing else. Getting dressed meant putting on a sweater, walking down the hall, and hoping. I am 56 and retired now, twenty-seven years in a school office behind me, and I care less about being fashionable than I used to. I care more about not leaving the house with my waistband twisted or a hem caught in my boot.

The Antok mirror is 71 inches tall and 28 inches wide, with an arched top and an aluminum frame. What sold me was the stand. The listing gives three ways to use it: on the included stand, mounted to the wall, or leaned against one. It was January, the bedroom was cold, and I did not want Gary putting holes in a wall before I knew whether I liked the thing. Standing it in the corner meant I could live with it a month and change my mind without patching plaster.

It came to the front porch in one long box, packed well, nothing broken and nothing scratched. Gary carried it in and set it on the stand in the corner opposite the window, which had been the dark corner since we moved the dresser out of it years ago. The mirror is heavy. If you buy one, plan on two people to move it, and plan on knowing where it lives before you take it out of the box, because once it is up you will not want to drag it around the house.

Ten months in, I have not once walked to the bathroom to check whether my shoes matched.

The bedroom window faces west. From about four in the afternoon the light comes in low, and the mirror throws it back across the room. I am not going to tell you a mirror changed my life. What it did was make a dim corner read brighter and the room feel a little wider than it is, and I noticed it that first afternoon and I still notice it in October, when the sun drops earlier and that corner needs all the help it can get.

The first week was strange, and I will say so. Seeing yourself full length under bedroom light is not the same as seeing your face over a sink at seven in the morning. I tugged at hems, turned sideways, and sighed a few times. Then it became ordinary, which is the nicest thing I can say about a piece of furniture in a house where everything is supposed to earn its place.

Ten months of daily use looks like this. I wipe the glass with a microfiber cloth two or three times a week and spray glass cleaner onto the cloth, never straight onto the mirror. The frame has not dulled or spotted, and the polished finish still looks like it did the week it arrived. The stand has not wobbled. I have not wall mounted it and probably will not, because I like being able to stand back and see the whole outfit, shoes included. The only real change is that the corner is now the brightest part of the room.

The arched top is the part I expected to regret. I thought it would look trendy in a 1978 ranch house with plain windows and a ceiling fan, and it does not. It softens that corner in a way a square mirror would not, and it sits well beside the old dresser instead of fighting it. If your room is all straight lines like mine is, that curve does more work than you would think.

What I do not love. It is heavy enough that I do not slide it out to vacuum behind it, so Gary does that part. The glass shows every fingerprint, especially when I grab the frame to steady myself in a hurry. And if you want it flush against the wall, that is a two-person job with the hardware, not a Saturday afternoon alone. None of that is a complaint about the way it works. It is just what owning a tall piece of glass in a small room is really like.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Measure the wall first, then measure how far back you need to stand. Seventy-one inches is taller than most people picture when they see it on a screen, and 28 inches wide takes more wall than a closet door mirror does. Think about where the light lands in that room in the afternoon, because a mirror in a dim corner earns its keep and a mirror facing a blank wall just sits there. Decide whether you want it standing or mounted before you order, since that changes which mirror you should buy in the first place. And be honest about whether you will use it. If what you want is something to lean in a hallway and walk past, buy lighter. Mine is the Antok, and it is a working mirror in a working house. It has stood in the same corner since January, I have my whole outfit in front of me every morning, and I would order it again.