The troll's mirror.

A fairy tale told in seven stories. 

The first one, which concerns itself with a broken mirror 

and what happened to its fragments.

All right, we will start with the story;
when we come to the end we shall know more than we know now.

Once upon a time there was a troll, the most evil troll of them all; he was called the devil.

One day he was particularly please with himself, for he had invented a mirror which had the strange power of being able to make anything good or beautiful that it reflected appear horrid; and all that was evil and worthless seem attractive and worthwhile.

The trolls then want to carry the mirror into Heaven with the idea of making fools of the angels and God, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror grins and shakes with delight. It shakes so much that it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth where it shatters into billions of pieces — some no larger than a grain of sand.

These splinters are blown around and get into people’s hearts and eyes, making their hearts frozen like blocks of ice and their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, only seeing the bad and ugly in people and things.

This is the first part of Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen (1845).

***

This tale of Hans Christian Anderson made me wonder how many of us,

look at ourselves with troll mirror splinters  in our eyes.

This link will take you to videos of the Dove New Beauty project.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqerj_qLn6hm4SzGdi8pRKA