Kjerstin Gruys

And she's chronicling her experience on a blog called Mirror Mirror Off the Wall.

The idea came to her during a flight home to Los Angeles, after a particularly taxing bout of wedding dress shopping with her mother in St. Louis.  She was reading a book about nuns that, as part of their religious practice, never looked in mirrors.

The idea, and its stark contrast to her own life, grabbed her. She wondered if she could resist looking in a mirror for a whole day and then immediately upped the ante: why not avoid them for a year?

She called her mother when she got off the plane and told her the idea.

“She said, ‘But you’re going to wait until after the wedding, right?’. That was the nail in the coffin.” Gruys gave herself two weeks to strategize on how to live without mirrors and then took the plunge. That was in the end of March.

Gruys usually calls the Bay Area home, but is currently finishing up grad school at UCLA, where she’s studying sociology, with a partial focus on body image. She also works for San Francisco non-profit About Face, evaluating the effectiveness of their programs that teach young girls to think critically about media and body image.

Several years ago, Gruys recovered from an eating disorder and part of her recovery included learning not to be so critical of her looks. Becoming a bride kicked her critical self into hyper-drive. It also didn’t help that she was living in L.A., which she called, “Maybe the capital of obsessing over your looks.”

In the two weeks she prepared to go without a mirror she did things like practice how to put on a minimalist makeup palate with nothing but her fingers. She nailed sheets up over the expansive mirror in her bathroom and over the ones embedded in her closet door. (“I realized how built into our lives mirrors are,” she said.)

She made up rules, like that she can’t look at pictures of herself and she can’t look at herself in reflective surfaces like windows. She does, of course, look in the side view and rear mirrors when she drives. She’s just careful not to steal looks at herself.

Gruys has been blogging about the experiment and it's finding an audience — on a slow day the blog gets about 300 readers, on a good day it gets about 3,000. She let her readers decide via vote whether she gets to look at her wedding photos. They said she could.

“I don’t know if I will,” she said, “But it’s nice to have the option.”

The hardest part, not surprisingly, is avoiding mirrors.

“I had to change the way I walk. I try to always look ahead, so I’m not looking at myself in storefront windows,” she said.

She also had to change the way she shops for clothes, something that she enjoys.

“I buy a lot of shoes now,” Said Gruys.

But one of the hardest things about giving up mirrors, she said, is casting off the sense of self they provide.

“I’ll be home, working alone, and I can’t even see myself. You start to wonder, ‘Do I even exist?’ ”

Gruys would like to see the project grow into something larger, like a book.

As part of her project Gruys has been researching the roles of mirrors in everyday life. One thing she’s noticed is how they've gradually crept into advertising. There are advertisements with mirrors on bus stops and on the mirrors of Chicago O’Hare Airport bathrooms.

Gruys says that she's looking forward to experimenting with makeup and clothes again next March, with the help of a mirror, but with less investment in how they will affect her life.

“The people I’m close to, the people I engage with on a daily basis, will treat me with respect no matter how ‘perfectly done up’ I am,” she said.