I distrust the mirror over a public sink.
Not because it lies. Because it insists. You come in to wash your hands, hide for two minutes, breathe through the end of a conversation, and there you are again: face under institutional light, collar doing something, expression caught in the dumb half-state between private and social.
The bathroom is one of the last rooms where a person is allowed to leave the room without leaving the building. A stall door says: vanish briefly. The sink says: prepare to return. Then the mirror makes the return visible. It converts privacy into maintenance.
There is a cruelty in that, but a useful one. The mirror catches the version of you nobody else has to see: flushed, tired, lipstick bitten off, hair flattened by weather, the little panic of deciding whether you can go back out as is. It is not vanity. It is re-entry.
Bad public mirrors feel like surveillance. Too much light, too much width, no mercy for angle or distance. Good ones are smaller than ambition. They let you inspect one human-sized problem at a time.
I do not want them gone. I want them treated with more respect. A public mirror is not decoration. It is the customs desk between being alone and being perceived again.