White & gold, or blue & black dress is driving people mad

Feb 27, 2015 08:47 GMT  ·  By

Almost two weeks ago, a woman posted on Tumblr a photo of a bandage dress with lace detailing; the item didn’t look like much because the photo was of poor quality, but that’s not what started the ongoing madness: the poster wanted to know what color the dress was. She and her friends couldn’t agree on it: was it white and gold, or blue and black?

The “What Color Is This Dress” debate is still ongoing, by the way, even though science has already provided an explanation for the major differences in perception in those looking at the photo. Yes, most people see the dress as white and gold or blue and black, but there are also those who see orange or brown for gold / black, or a light shade of purple or blue or grey for the white / dark blue.

So what color is the dress really? You can see it in the photo attached.

The dress that broke the Internet

As you can see from the samples below, Twitter is still talking about the dress, with messages grouped under the hashtags #thedress or #whiteandgold and even #dressgate, for those who woke up feeling a bit more dramatic.

Regular people and celebrities are all weighing in on this, trying to convince the other side that what they see is real and not the other way around.

Of course, there are also those who took this new hot topic and turned it into something more fun, tired of all the arguing, which, in many cases, felt genuine. The creepy Oscars 2015 John Travolta was introduced to TheDress (which he obviously tried to kiss), as also were the two llamas that caused a commotion in Arizona by running away and refusing to let their captors take them back.

Others explained the very existence of the dress by finding clues linking it to the Illuminati, while some blamed it on magic. Even fictional characters, like Professor Snape from “Harry Potter” (see the second to last tweet below) had something to say on the topic.

As of the time of writing, camp white and gold is convinced they’re right, but the same goes for camp blue and black. With neither willing to budge an inch, and both offering all kinds of arguments to back up their story, who are we to believe? Science, of course.

Science FTW

The dress is blue and black in reality. The only reason people see it white and gold (or other variants of it, like blue and brown) is in the way our minds perceive and interpret light and color. Cedar Riener, associate professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College, tells Buzzfeed that this explains the differences between individual perceptions and also why they’re so drastic.

He says that what is happening with the perception of the colors of the dress is the same thing that happens with the Adelson checkboard optical illusion, where 2 squares are perceived as two different shades of grey when they are identical in reality.

Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, says for Wired that, while individual perceptions of colors always vary, this is the first time he encounters such polarized and varied reactions.

He sees white and gold, even though he knows the dress is blue and black. As he puts it, the colors on the dress and the exposure to light “hit some kind of perceptual boundary,” which explains the different ways in which it’s perceived.

So now we know: the dress that broke the Internet and continues to be such a hot topic of debate is actually black and blue, but there’s nothing wrong with you if you perceive it as white and gold.