February 16, 2026
Foil wars in your kitchen
Why does aluminum foil have one shiny side and one with a matte finish?
Shiny side, dull side, and a spelling war — kitchen myth busted, comments on fire
TLDR: Foil has one shiny and one matte side because it’s rolled in pairs, and it doesn’t matter which side faces your food. Commenters turned that into a kitchen myth brawl, a US–UK spelling fight over “aluminum/aluminium,” and jokes about foil hats and “woke beams,” proving even pantry items spark drama.
The internet just discovered why foil has a shiny side and a dull side — and the comments are the real show. The article says it’s simple: foil is rolled in pairs, so the outside gets polished by the rollers (shiny!) and the touching sides come out matte. And no, it doesn’t matter which side faces your food. But try telling that to the kitchen warriors.
One camp swore the shiny side “reflects heat better,” with johng asking if it should face the food in the oven. The science crowd piled in with a chorus of “nope,” pointing back to the column’s bottom line: it makes no difference for everyday cooking. Meanwhile, dnemmers earned teacher’s-pet points by quoting the exact line about the “two sheets, face to face,” as if highlighting the answer would end the war (it didn’t).
Then things went gloriously off the rails. CLPadvocate used the moment to ignite a classic flame war: aluminum vs aluminium — and yes, the chemists are “deeply annoyed.” Across the aisle, rich_sasha cracked the post of the day asking which side better reflects “woke beams from space,” sending the thread into meme mode and reviving the legendary MIT foil helmet study. Finally, botusaurus wondered if skipping the last rolling would make both sides shiny — to which production folks basically said: enjoy your torn, unusable foil. Internet: foiled again.
Key Points
- •Household aluminum foil has a shiny and a matte side due to the final rolling step performed with two sheets stacked together.
- •The outer surfaces contact polished steel rollers and become shiny; the inner contacting surfaces become matte.
- •It does not matter which side of aluminum foil faces food during use.
- •Foil is made from 98.5% pure aluminum and rolled to about 0.0005 inches for household use; single sheets at this thickness would tear without the paired final pass.
- •Historically, tinfoil was used for wraps and in Edison’s phonograph, but it was replaced by aluminum foil; a 2005 MIT study examined foil helmets and radio signals.