The Famous Dress That Broke the Internet: A Scientific Breakdown 

"White and gold or black and blue" I see blue and gold I feel like such a hipster

I saw it as light blue & gold

When he pulled the colours out of the picture around 1:28 those colours are exactly the colours that I saw in the dress. I get all the stuff about our brains correcting colour, but nothing in the picture hints to me that there's anything wrong with the colour, so my brain goes with the obvious conclusion that the colours in the actual image are the colours of the dress: a light and slightly faded blue and a muddy dark grey.

it looks pale blue and gold/brown, that gold/brown doesn't look black at all

It baffles me how anyone could call that blue colour "white" when clearly there is white in the background and margin and it's clearly not the same colour as the "supposedly white" in the dress. This truly baffles me.

The second I saw that dress all over twitter and facebook I knew it was blue and black. My graphic design/photography brain immediately knew the white balance was awful and I color corrected it in my head.

I see the dress as blue and muddy brown.

2:40 True Hank "Green" :D

I can see it both black and blue and white and gold. But not voluntary. It just switches from time to time.

Initially I saw white and gold... on closer inspection I see it as a very pale blue and gold... I have NO idea how anyone could see the lace as being black, but whatever lol

Why do people say you either see blue and black or white and gold??? What about us people who see blue and gold???

its blue and gold im so lonly 😂

Looks light blue and shit brown to me >_>

For me, light blue and gold. Am I weird?

Question is, if the shot was wider with more stuff in it, would our brains have an easier time figuring out the true color of the dress? With more reference material to work with, I bet our brains would AT LEAST be able to figure out that the colors were off somehow.

When you broke down the colors one by one, it’s exactly how I see the dress, a royal blue and a muddy really dark gold almost black but not completely black. Amazing how people don’t see the same

Oh shoot, not this again, listen people, it's blue and gold.

Bottom line: The dress is black and blue. That's the color of the original dress and you cannot argue with that fact. If you use the "eyedropper" tool in paint to "prove" that part of the dress is gold, you are seeing the reflection of the yellow light in which the photo was taken. That's all. It's a blue and black dress held up in a room with harsh, yellow light. Done. Discussion over. No arguing. Those are facts.

We actually took a picture with the same problem at school some time ago. A friend of mine had sewn a frilly black trim with beads onto a dark blue skirt. To take a picture for documentation, she whipped out her iPhone to take a picture. At some distances, when the camera had another reference to take a good image, the colors were correct, black and blue, however when she got too close and the reflex in the shiny satin fabric messed up the camera's white balance, everyone agreed that the skirt looked white and gold in the picture. When even your eyes don't have a point of reference to decide the color, the camera is the boss. Even if it's wrong.

I see white and gold, my wife is yelling at me that it's not.

I am the only around here who see all the time a light blue and brown ??

"No-one sees the dress as the color it actually is portrayed as in the picture." I don't know what you mean by that. I see the color just as those blown up color samples represent. Both before and after seeing the color samples.

This is my absolute favorite example of perspective and interpreting information.

The funniest thing about all of this is that people forget they're aren't looking at an actual dress but at a screen which is projecting colored light at their eyes. Screens which aren't calibrated identically. We're actually not all looking at the same image, because each of our screen projects color in a slightly different way. Change the brightness on your device's screen and you'll be surprised how much the dress can change color in your perception.

What i honestly see is a dark brown and shadowed white. The blueness of the white is caused by the shadow... But the real question is... What light causes black to appear gold and blue to appear white?

Oh my god why is it even a question? It's CLEARLY green and red. Everyone else is automatically wrong because of my always being right because I'm the center of the universe. Also, everyone who tries to argue with me on this I will rage at like a bratty 12 year old and summarily block.

I see it as light blue and gold.

When I first saw the picture, I was asked "What color is this dress" Everyone pretty much hated on me after I said "blue and gold" Now I'm just happy I'm unique

I definitely see purpley-Blue and browny-gold. But Hank just said no one could see it like that...

I can't fathom how people see this as white and gold.

Me in 2020 staring at the dress to see blue and black: ○👄○ Me when I still see gold and white: ●👄●

There is actually three and not two perceptions of this dress: black & blue, white & gold, and blue & gold. The third one is not talked about anywhere and i don’t know why, maybe because a very small percentage of people see it in those colors and are ignored. It may also be that the colors in the third perception are not so absolute, which makes people label them as different colors although they all actually see the same thing. For example, I would personally say I see lavender and brown, but someone else (who sees the same colors as me) might say light blue and dark gold.

That first night, my roommate came in and asked what color I saw. I said Lavender and bronze. She gave me a look of horror when she said she saw blue black and this guy saw white gold. This was before we realized how big it had gotten yet. I have seen it rotate between white gold, to lavender bronze, to blue black several times, sometimes even before my eyes. I don't get how some people have only seen it as one color only. It seems whenever i see the image somewhere I see a different color. Even in one of the 'related videos' I saw it was white gold and by the time I finished this video, it was lavender bronze.

I'm not seeing the same thing as everyone else. When you pulled out the colors at 1:30, that's exactly what I see when looking at the dress. I think my brain is combining the two potential interpretations into the real one. Or maybe I'm just one of a strange few who can see it right.

This is the second video ive seen on this and its still blue and gold

Hank I love you so much! You literally made me love science! You make it so interesting and relevant!

THE COLOR I SEE KEEPS CHANGING EVEN THOUGH I'M LOOKING AT THE EXACT SAME PICTURE HELP

But what colour is Hank's shirt?

I know its not related to the video but I have this tingling curiosity of how quicksand works and how it happens and you really live a video from your channel to explain it. Thanks keep up with the good Work :) Raquel a Random curious girl from Mozambique

I love your white and gold shirt Hank.

Honestly, I see it as medium-brown and medium-blue. Anybody else?

The weird thing is that I saw both. Once on my pc it appeared to my white-gold and on the mobile phone blue-black. The image was on two different news-magazines, but ehn I revisited the other picture its colors have changed.

I was able to see both at different times

Let's do this team blue and black

The colors keep switching on me every 5 seconds

i see black and blue.. am i the only one???everyone is saying I'm seeing it wrong

SO IT WAS JUST REVEALED TO ME THAT YOU (HANK) AND JOHN GREEN ARE BROTHERS AND MY MIND IS BLOWN. I probably should've assumed that with the level of awesome you both bestow upon the internet and life, but I try not to presume that everyone with the same last name is related. So, thank you. Thank you both for being so utterly magnificent.

Am I the only one who can see both??? ...not at the same time, but I can see both color combos...

I saw White and Gold at first before I knew what was going on and continued reading the article it was in.... Read it was supposed to be black and blue... Scrolled back up and suddenly it was black and blue and I checked and double checked to see if it was a .gif or to reset the page... But I couldn't get it to go back to white and gold.

In the video and on polls it was said that very few, if any, people actually saw the dress in the picture for what the colors actually were in the picture (being a funky light blue and a crap-colored brown). I wonder what would the cause be if someone saw that, however? I, myself, originally saw light blue and brown from the start, without having been told anything, and I'm curious if this means either my brain never bothered adjusting for light levels, my eyes are hypersensitive, or something entirely different.

Visiting this video again. Ah, memories.

I've seen all of them. It changes throughout the day.

I don't know anymore...I originally saw it as black and blue, but now that I look at it closer, I see blue and gold. I can see how the blue can be interpreted as white, and the gold interpreted as black...

The really creepy thing about a perception shift is when you view the same picture differently sometimes once you know what is going on. Day before yesterday, because I thought the headline was silly (it was simply asking what colour was this dress), I saw white and gold, but when I actually bothered to read the headline, and saw the picture again I saw a faded blue and black dress. I thought the image was an animated gif, but no matter how many times I refreshed or checked the location of the image, it was the same image. Even creepier for a long while I would shift between those two images, at one point I saw it the white and gold shift into blue and black. After all that I decided it was best to stop looking at the picture for my sanity.

I knew it was black and blue from the beginning, from looking not at the dress itself, but the parts of the picture around it to see how incredibly bright the lighting is everywhere else, and knowing how various colors look when washed out (yay art background!). Was weird to me hearing how passionately folks would argue the other side, even after I explained it to them or showed them directly putting black office chairs toward a window and having them see the different hues that would show in the lit side vice the parts still behind the wall. But on the flipside, there were also a lot of photoshopped versions of the pic floating around with the values messed with in order to push it definitively to one side or the other.

I remember the exact moment I first saw it. I thought for sure it was white and gold but now I can’t unsee blue and black.

SciShow I used to see Black and Blue, then a couple of hours later I saw Gold and White, THEN Black and Blue, now Gold and white. WHY AM I CHANGING? IS IT PUBERTY?

But I see the colours EXACTLY as they are in the picture.. like for real. So, what does that mean? like a purply colour with a sort of brownish gold colour

Thank you Hank! You saved the internet!!!

Thanks for the information

Here is the thing. During that little segment where you separate the dress colours from the image? Not seeing a difference. For me, the dress is very much that kinda dingy blue and muddy brown that I recognize as what happens to black fabric when you put too much light on it. As a student of psychology who is mildly obsessed with perception, I am extremely disappointed that I don't see something other than what the picture actually presents on its face. It is exactly the kind of thing that I would gleefully embrace as a consequence of imperfection perception. However, I am apparently not destined to see anything special here, and that bums me out.

Apparently I'm no one.. I see the muddy colours that are actually in the image.

1 year after this still see it white and gold

The dress is fluorescent pink and lime green

my brain is perfect, i percieved the colours perfectly, i saw all the pulled colours of the image in the actual image and also pecieved the dress to be black and blue whilst also recognising that the image wasn't completely true to blue and black

#TEAMWhiteAndGold YES HANK!

i love that gold and red shirt hank has on.

I saw it as lavender and beige the first time I saw it and I still see it that way. Glad to know that's actually what the photograph portrays :)

Thumbs up. Glad you all covered this! Most of us are still #BlackAndBlue

That means I actually DO see it the way it really looks! SO YOU'RE WRONG, HANK! Some people actually do see it for how it really looks like, and I can't be the only one - even if I'm in quite the minority. (I see it as the pixels were when blown up; some kind of dingy lavender and dirty/brownish gold)

I've always seem the question of the dress being asked with options. I honestly think that's the main thing, like when people are given the exact same thing twice but told to point out the differences

Black/blue Team convinced me. Now I'm always wearing black and blue cloth when I go for jogging in the evening. You know, to be better seen by drivers at night, like the bright colours in the picture.

I DONT NEED ANOTHER VIDEO ABOUT THIS

I cannot see the White. Seriously. I see Blue and Black.

It literally switched right infront of my eyes.

It's not just the camera, the people who uploaded it also argued about it in person and that's why one of them uploaded it

For the love of the Holy Dollar Sign, can we stop talking about this dress already? There are tons of similar and more interesting color illusions to discuss. Also, it's blue and black, get over it.

was I the only one that saw the colors that were actually in the pic ?

thank you lord and scishow for this , it is helping me in my tok

2018 and I'm still here

I personally at one point saw the colors change before my eyes...pretty creepy (wasn't a gif) And nice shirt ;)

When my wife showed me the picture and I said "uhhh blue and black... (wtf is this about?)" and she said white and gold, I was *convinced* she was trying to set me up for a joke. I still lack whatever it is that lets someone see white and gold. I mean, the background brightness creates a context which (to my brain) *always* makes the dress blue and black by comparison. It's instinctive and obvious.

I have actually seen it as both, but the more I looked at the picture the more it seemed to be white and gold

I saw it as white + gold when scrolling past it on my tumblr dash, so when next to all the white, as he mentioned, my brain probably interpreted it as white + gold in motion. But remember that spinning sillouhette girl gif? That was straight up perception and no one even fought over it, lol.

I see it both ways

Seriously, people are saying it changes for them but for me it's always been light blue and brown.

It keeps changinnn whaaaatttt

A similar perception issue can occur with hearing too. In psych they played a partial sound, and put it on repeat. The same series of speech sounds comes to you “Kathy Lane” and gradually changes to “calculate” and oscillates between the two. Or you might just hear one of those. My roommates were playing an audiobook to teach them a few phrases in conversational German. Excuse me is something like “Enshuldigen xie”. The shul part has a non-English sound. You have to make a new sound to say it correctly. My roommates... none of them, could perceive that sound. Drove me nuts because I was nearby hearing them failing. I went over to help. But even focussing their attention on the one syllable wasn’t enough for them to get to the new “shul” sound. It ended up I went to Germany myself the next year. And on the train I said “enshuldigen xie” and motioned that I wanted to get to the window seat... the person moved aside and tried to strike up a conversation. In German. I had no idea what he was saying. I had literally 30 words of German. His perception was I was a native speaker based on 2 words. Perception isn’t reality. It’s a best-guess at reality.

2:55 Even the version edited to look black and blue looks white and gold

Honestly, that dress is ugly.

THIS DRESS IS GOLD AND BLUE

That’s crazy I just spoke to myself to see it the other color and now I see it black and blue when I’ve always seen white n gold.

Oh, I get it, it's like those ambiguous drawings you see where you could either see it two ways depending on how the eyes are comfortable with seeing it, but instead of shapes, this is color perception. I'm team black and blue, by the way. :) My eyes are more comfortable naturally interpreting it that way, just like others will see the white and gold, the opposite threshold. Fascinating stuff.

i see it as brown and blue actually xD xXx

Oh my gosh! My older sister sees it brownish yellow and purple too!

I can choose which colors I see it as but sometimes it is much more difficult to see it one way but sometimes the transition is pretty easy.

My English teacher used this to teach us about perspectives in writing.

I kind of hate that this is overshadowing Lenard nemoy's death. Live long and prosper

Love the black background.

I've seen both. I saw the dress gold and white, go to church, come back, and the whole thing has changed. I was very perplexed.