To provide a light-emitting element capable of maintaining high light extraction efficiency and reducing the reflectance of external light.

The light-emitting element excites a light-emitting layer by an excitation source to cause the light-emitting layer to emit light and extracts the light from the light-emitting layer to the outside, and has a back layer on the opposite side of the side extracting the light from the light-emitting layer. The back layer provides in order from the light-emitting layer a dielectric layer having a smaller effective refraction index than that of the light-emitting layer and a fine metal structure for changing the magnitude of reflectance in response to the wavelength of injected light by interacting with the injected light. The back layer has such a structure that the reflectance of the back layer for the light injected to the dielectric layer at an angle more than or equal to the critical angle determinable by the total reflection condition of the interface between the light-emitting layer and the dielectric layer results in lower reflectance than the reflectance of the back layer for the light injected to the dielectric layer at a less angle than the critical angle.