One of the many trends spawned by the internet is a phenomenon known as Reflectoporn — the deliberate posting of photographs of items with reflective surfaces to online auction sites, with those pictures “accidentally” capturing reflected images of the sellers/photographs in various states of undress. The photograph that is generally credited with kicking off the Reflectoporn trend is an image of a tea kettle, which was posted to sold.com.au, an Australian on-line auction site, in August 2001 and thereafter widely mocked: PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT  This is a quick note to all would-be auctioneers: Folks, if you’re going to be selling something that people are going to be drinking fluids out of, please take some extra time to either put on some clothes before taking a picture, or concentrate on selling the non-reflective items in your kitchen. Thank you. That the posting of the revealing image was unlikely to have been accidental was confirmed by a trace of the seller’s user ID, which showed him to be one of a group of people who were planting similar pictures on various web sites. Other examples of Reflectoporn appeared in an auction for a television on the UK version of eBay in December 2002:  And in an eBay auction for a guitar in April 2003:  We started seeing the following picture of a dining room set in February 2005, although we don’t know if it actually was, as claimed, used in on-line auction posting or other type advertisement:
A seller submitted a photo of a tea kettle with a revealing reflection to an online auction site.