Can you see through sheer roller blinds at night?

Yes, almost certainly! Sheer roller blinds can provide a degree of privacy from prying eyes during the day, but they’re not designed to protect your modesty whilst in the bath of an evening with the lights on in the room behind you.

Sheer roller blinds tend to be paired with another blind behind them to be used to fully block external light and hide the contents of the room and its occupants; because for privacy and to perform all of the usual blinds functions, a sheer roller blind alone isn’t really the right choice.

Sheer roller blinds can be very nice to look at, and are a good way to take the edge off glare whilst retaining the natural light, so they do have uses and merits. However, they shouldn’t be thought of in general as the sort of blinds you’d use to darken a room or to stop people from seeing in.

In this blog post, I’ll talk about how see-through sheer roller blinds are in different situations, and what people might be able to view of inside if you’re using them.

Can you see through sheer roller blinds at night when the lights are off inside?

No. If your room is in darkness and your sheer roller blinds are closed/down, someone peering in wouldn’t see anything of inside. This does assume that the room is fully or almost fully dark; if there’s light coming into it under the internal door or due to say, a television being on inside of the room, this may allow people outside to get some sort of view of inside.

Can you see through sheer roller blinds at night if you have the lights on?

Yes. If you have lights on in your room and your sheer roller blind is closed, people outside will still be able to get more or less as good a view of inside as they would if the blind was fully open. The sheer blind might soften the edges of things or make the room look a little blurred, but it won’t hide much, and will provide a clear view of the room and its occupants.

The brighter your room is compared to how dark it is outside, the more that people outside will be able to see in.

Can you see through sheer roller blinds at night from a distance?

This depends how far away the person/viewer is, and the angle they have on the room. It also depends to an extent on the thickness/opacity of the blind, as some sheer roller blinds are virtually see-through even in natural light, whilst others are somewhat thicker and produce an almost stained-glass type of effect in terms of how well they obscure the view of inside.

That said, if you’re working on the basic principle that the lights are on in the room and it’s dark outside, how well people can see in will then depend on how far they are from the window, and how good an angle of vision they have.

If, say, you have a long driveway or garden between your window and the road, people on the pavement that look towards your home would probably not be able to get much of an impression of what was going on inside other than say, the level of light, the colour of your walls, and any movement.

The same holds true if your window is high up – such as an apartment on an upper floor. People at street level won’t be able to see in with any clarity due to both the distance and the angle. However, someone in another building across the way at the same height might well see in a lot more clearly.

Can you see through sheer roller blinds at night if they’re paired with a more opaque blind?

Not if the other blind is closed! This is the approach that most people take to using sheer roller blinds; pairing it with an opaque blind that can be used to block the light entirely and to enable privacy.

To achieve this, you’d hang the sheer roller blind inside of the window recess, and the other blind outside of the recess. This allows you to mix and match or fine-tune the light and privacy. You can also pair the sheer roller blind with curtains instead of a second blind, if you prefer.