No reflection in a mirror.

The oil-and-ultraviolet reconstruction is withdrawn. An anti-reflective film on skin governs how much light the skin returns, not whether a mirror forms an image. Baseline skin is already a diffuse reflector. Near-ultraviolet cannot degrade a visible-wavelength image, and soda-lime glass is opaque below about 350 nanometres. Thin-film interference needs uniform thickness and a coherent source; no sebaceous face supplies either. Chapter 13 never made the optical claim. What folklore recorded was a face that failed in a silver-backed glass.

Two conditions. First, foxing: unsealed silver-backed glass, and Venetian tin-mercury amalgam, take atmospheric sulphur through the board and the edges. The product is silver sulphide, Ag₂S. Conservation literature, not a claim of the organism. Cumulative; irreversible without resilvering; short-wavelength reflectance falls. An unrestored domestic mirror of a century's standing returns a dim, warm-shifted, low-contrast image of anything. That degradation is not selective. Second, schlieren. The bio-voltaic drive is electrochemical, not thermogenic. Skin sits below baseline. A denser boundary layer persists. At thirty to sixty centimetres the light crosses it twice. On a clean modern reflector the deviation is a slight softening. On foxed glass, by candle or oil lamp, it is the margin between a face and no face. Aluminium vapour-deposition from the 1930s forms no sulphide and self-passivates. Modern mirrors are exempt. The rule should have been updated. It was not.

The compiler's note accepts the three objections by name and withdraws the earlier mechanism without reservation. The present account is graded below the galvanic mechanism that precedes it in the same chapter: tarnish is documented; the thermal gradient is unmeasured, an inference from cold skin. Falsification is Path Four-A: background-oriented schlieren imaging. Persistence of the rule into the aluminium era is lost observational contact, the oral tradition transmitted by rote. Not holiness. Not a coating that works on every mirror.