I immediately saw blue and black and literally can't understand how anyone would think it was gold and white. Like, my brain just doesn't compute that possibility. I love that one innocent picture of a dress sparked massive controversy, changed what we understand about vision, and tore families and friendships apart. XD
I understand your point of view, but for me it's the exact opposite. My brain can't compute how gold is black for some and the white is blue for some. It is gold and white. I cant see anything else....
@@S.D666 Yes I agree and know the true color of the dress im just saying i cant for the life of me see anything other than gold and white in that picture and that makes me sad. my vision is near perfect (no eye glasses or anything and im 34 now). so i guess my perception of color is lacking instead then :D
So people usually tell me "the background shows it's obviously over exposed!" But my head reads it as "there's a blinding light behind the dress, and we're on the shaded side." So I've never seen black and seems i never will haha. I've tried a bajillion tricks over the years, no dice. ETA: Didn't even expect people to see this. I know my perception isn't the correct one, I was there during the height of this "drama" lol. I just wanted to possibly explain why my brain sees it incorrectly, to those who don't understand.
I get this point of view, as white is bluish in the shadow. what I don't get is, when the light would come from behind, the edges would still have to be pure white and gold. And this is not the case. Secondly. There is a lighter part in the middle of the dress. So it just can't be as dark as it has to for being so blue. I have to say, that his example of the dress in the sunlight, if I cut half of the picture, I could see a white dress with a dark muddy gold.
After I had my cataract surgery, I realized that colors that I saw a beige and gray were actually periwinkle and blue-purple. I learned that my eyes weren't allowing in enough light to see the true colors. I previously was a person who saw the dress as white and gold.
😂 i saw it as gold and white before and after my cataract surgery. I was legally blind in my right eye, had multi focus lens put in. Best thing i ever did for me!
This is so interesting! I’m 25 but I have cataracts and I’ve always seen the dress as white/gold. I’ll be very curious if my perception of colour changes after cataract surgery.
Lighter eyes colors let in more light... I would be interested to know if perception of the image varies by eye color. BTW, I have grey-blue eyes and the dress has always looked blue and black to me.
I’m watching this a year on and really enjoyed hearing from an ophthalmologist on this. I too saw white and gold, still do. I am 60+ with very light blue eyes with smaller pupils (due to medication, I think). Thank you so much for this! I look forward to seeing more of your content.
I remember when this whole dress colors thing was going on and then the "yanny" "laurel" audio thing after it. It has helped me to understand that the way people perceive our world can be as different and unique as individual people are themselves.
@@charmaccents6278 Yanny/Laurel is just an audio clip where you hear either Yanny or Laurel. If you think about either word, you can hear it. A simple search should present you with a video that includes the sound. There were a few similiar sound clips after Yanny and Laurel that focused on different words but had the same idea. Although Yanny/Laurel is conaidered the original.
@@MusicComet well, I always hear Yanny no matter how hard I try to hear Laurel. Only if I significantly drop the pitch I can hear Laurel. and then if I smoothly increase the pitch back I can hear Laurel, but at the very time it's back to original pitch, the sound just switches back to Yanny. And even if I drop the pitch right after but grop it slightly it's still Yanny, so to hear Laurel again I have to repeat the process.
I see white and gold also. Surprised by the study that indicates a majority see blue and black because most people in my orbit saw white and gold also. I teach at a university so my sample included a wide range of ages. I think the image is more about how light manipulation influences our perception of color.
It drives me crazy when people can’t see this as blue & black. Even when he messed with the editing program and the camera and lighting I still saw it as blue & black
I see blue and black, but I think I understand why some others see white and gold. Still, with the surroundings in the picture, my brain has concluded it's an overexposed picture of a stiff-ish dress and decides the dress is blue and black. I'm quite familiar with this type of how "blue" appears since for both my grade school and high school years, my uniform has always been blue. I've seen my uniform appear this way countless times, and honestly, it's the blue giving it away for me to conclude the other color is black.
This is interesting. It literally always looks blue and black to me no matter what you do with the filters. I wonder if there's a correlation with my perception of it and the fact that I'm an artist. It'd be interesting if there was a study testing artist's perceptions (as in visual artists) to non-artists, and if there is a correlation, that sort of implies that someone could potentially train themselves to see it the correct way after learning more about colour, light, and shading via art.
How we perceive color is a neurological phenomena in concert with the function of the (color) cones in our eyes. As an artist, who is also a strong colorist, I can attest that there are certain aspects of “learning how” to see color, and that has to do with what I already mentioned and a bit of training to notice and learn how to describe different tonal variations often in relation to both other color and values (light to dark). That being said, I asked students in my classroom and not one of us could see the blue/black combination. If we were to see the physical dress, I’m sure we would perceive it as it truly is. I tend to think it is a phenomena of how the computer screen and the blueness of it tend to break up the pixelation and some of us have neurology that is affected one way while others another way.
The blue and brown option is interesting because everytime I see the dress I see blue and gold/tan, even though I know it's blue and black. But at first glance the black always looks gold or tan, and I think it's because light is refracting off of the lycra/nylon in the lace details. I've never seen it as white though, and after a second my eyes always adjust to the coloring and it looks normal.. It's really fascinating how so many people can see one thing so differently.
I've seen blue/black and white/gold just by looking at the picture using different smartphones and computers. Right now I saw a light blue/lavender & gold dress but when he was showing the picture to his friend using the iPad I saw a blue/black dress. 😝
This is the very first time I realized that there's a third group of people - the one I'm in - who see it as BLUE and BROWN... The blue I see in the lightest part of the blue (center bottom) is about the same shade as the youtube 'Comment' button, and the brown isn't really BROWN (like a UPS truck), it's a washed out brown like diluted tea or coffee. I can tell it's informed by the highlighted color at the top of the dress, because if I scroll down so I can't see that very brightly lit panel at the top right by the neck, the striped at the bottom become a LOT more convincingly black - the washed out somewhere-between-potato-brown-and-dark-olive-drab color throws my perception of the rest for a loop.
It's literally periwinkle and ochre, if you do a sample search. The actual digital image is objectively the color of dentist scrubs and a camel suede purse.
I’ve literally always seen it as white and gold, but for some reason when you put the original photo up next to the online listing I had to pause and look and it for a while bc I could finally, FINALLY see it as blue and black for the first time lmao. Like definitely very faded/washed out, but still.
I originally saw it as blue and black. Then maybe a year or two ago, I decided to look at the original picture again and I saw white and gold. I was baffled that my eyes were actually seeing it differently than before. Then I kept staring at it for a good few minutes and it then turned black and blue again in my vision and I’ve been seeing it as blue and black since. I was also amazed that my eyes actually turned the colors I was seeing back to black and blue while I was looking at it.
when I saw this RU-vid thumbnail I saw white and gold, I click the video then I saw blue and black. I came back to video thumbnail, it's stays blue and black. I don't know how, it baffles me. my daughter (5 y/o) never sees this, she says it's white and gold/brown.
I actually had the exact OPPOSITE experience! One time I saw it cropped slightly differently and was astonished that it looked blue and black, but every other time (before and since) I see white and gold.
@Kyle Nason this was my Exact experience... I saw it as blue & black, looked at it again, saw white & gold, thought WOW!, then went back to blue & black and can't get the white & gold back. So bizarre.
I can see both as well! When it blew up on the internet a few years ago I only saw blue and black, on the thumbnail and at the beginning I still saw it as blue and black but during the video it changed to white and gold when I told my brain that these are the colors. Since then I see the lace part as a mixture of black and a dark gold (I can see that people see it as goldish when I look at the part where it’s bright from the light) and the fabric as a light blue that I can also see as a cool white when I tell my brain that it’s a white dress 🤷🏼♀️ I can kind of switch how I view it now
My daughter showed me this dress and asked me what color it was. I told her it was white and gold like gold leaf had been applies to the golden stripes. She was astonished and explained that it is blue and black. I explained that in the early days of computer monitors offering super VGA resolution that I had been tested and could perceive nearly 16 million color variations presented to me on a high-quality screen. We were both amazed that we saw different images looking at the same dress. Thanks for your explanation.
Just zoom, suuuuper zoom each colour. Screencap and crop an even rectangle and isolate them over a white background exactly like a Pantone sample. Try to forget the dress and simply describe the "pantone" you are seeing. Hope it helps😉
What drives me crazy is I saw the dress as gold/white the first couple of times I saw this photo and after that I started seeing the dress as gold/white. Even now, years later I still see blue/black. Why did I used to see it one way before and then never see it that way again?!?!
The ex-web designer in me sees blue and brown/gold because that's what it is on the digital image. I suspect what people see depends a lot on what device they view it on and how it is calibrated. Using the images at 1:15 and putting them into an image editor and looking at the rgb values confirms what you are seeing. On the image of the actual dress, the 'black' sections have a relatively even red/green/blue component, and a level of around 30. This colour is dark gray bordering on black. In the blue sections, the red and green stay around 30, but the blue component jumps up above 100 in most places therefore the colour is blue. On the over exposed image, the 'gold' sections, the red and green are fairly similar tho red is slightly more dominant, with a lower value of blue. The blue section of the dress has much higher RGB values overall, roughly R100, G120, B160 giving it a light blue tinge. Although these values increase and decrease, they maintain roughly the same balance. These RGB values confirm what I see on my device. If someone sees different colours I would suggest you put it into a photo editor and see if the RGB values match the colours you are seeing. Viewing things on a monitor is very heavily dependent on how it is configured and is often slightly different to how colours are generated in physical print. Computers generally use RGB, which is an additive system, physical prints such as magazines use CYMK, a subtractive system. Print designers need to be very careful of this and monitor calibration is a must, and designers often work with pantone values to ensure it comes out correct when printed onto a page.
@@willianditaquera I never said I saw green. Colours on a PC are created by mixing the amount of red, green and blue (known as RGB) in the range of 0 to 255. 0 on all red, green and blue produces black. 255 on all produces white. When you have similar values for all they produce a gray-ish colour either lighter or darker depending on where they fall on the 0-255 scale. If there is a dominant value (eg on the green, say 50 red, 100 green, 50 blue) the produced colour will be picked up as a shade of that. If you have 2 dominant colours, for example red and green, the colour generated will be more of a shade of yellow. 'Gold' has a dominant red value, a low blue value, and a green value close to the middle of them both. Viewing an image of an object on a pc screen is very different from seeing the object in real life. The computer image is very dependent on how it was recorded and how it is displayed, and much less on your own eyes. In real life, your eyes can be deceived far more by lighting, viewing angles etc.
The screen could be a component, but my fiancé and I just watched this on the same screen and with opposite perceptions. I saw white/gold, he saw blue/black. So wild.
An interesting phenomenon! If you asked me what color the dress is, I'd say blue and black, but if you asked me what colors I see in the image, I'd say dull blue and dark olive brown. My brain immediately recognizes that the exposure is affecting the colors and translates them to blue and black. So I can understand seeing gold in the image, but it boggles my mind that some people think the lighter color on the dress is white. I don't think this is related, but my eyes are very sensitive to blue/violet. Saturated royal blue objects are difficult for me to see details on, and blue LED lights turn into a blur. I can't read the text on signs that use blue LED lettering at nearly any distance. Sometimes blue Christmas lights make my eyes ache. I've never run into another person with this issue, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who has it!
I’m the exact same way with blue neon light! It’s very noticeable when in a shopping plaza at night and all the red and yellow signs I can see clearly but the blue ones are blurred. I also see blue and black in the dress, but it’s a brownish faded black and washed out blue. But like yourself I was able to recognize it’s the quality of the image, and could compensate mentally. I used to work heavily in graphic design and image editing so washed out photos and how it changes colors is familiar to me. I’d love to see another study that explored peoples experience with photo manipulation or photography and how it effects their perception of the dress.
I have the same issue, mainly with blue LED's although I thought it was pretty common. You have far more red & green receptors in your eye than blue, so strong blue coloured light sources are likely to be seen in 'low' resolution.
I feel the same way. I thought my sister and I were the only ones like this. My brain doesn't comprehend how anyone can see the blue part of the dress as white.
@@Yuni-is-Schrodingers-Fox I don't see that part as either actually, so I don't understand how people see black or gold but black actually makes more sense to me since it's somewhat closer to what I see than gold.
I saw white and gold but at around the 6:00 mark in the video when he showed George the image on the tablet - I saw the dress as blue and black for the first time. Back to the study boys. Something about seeing it from an angle, the lighting reflecting off of the tablet created a change in my perception. In addition, When I made the image full screen at that mark I saw Gold and White again. When I reduced it, my brain kept trying to force the Glod and White to my eyes but now I see the blue and black. I am caught in a perpetual loop of seeing it both ways now. I wonder if angle has an affect?
My goodness you're right! I also did his trick of staring at the blown out white area then at the dress, and the colors did deepen, but not quite to true blue and black.
This happened to me a few years ago but reversed. I usually see blue and black but my sister had it on her laptop, I stood up and the laptop was tilted backward and I saw the gold and white and I was so surprised lol
I can also see it as both blue/black and white/gold depending on my brightness/darkness of my screen, lighting in my room, etc. I learned about this in my lighting class because this is basic color theory. Colors are only a perception in our brain depending on the lighting.
I’ve always seen white and gold. Today, after watching the bright background (around minute 8), when the image popped up, I saw it as blue and black for the first time. As I continued to look at it, it gradually got lighter until it looked white and gold again.
What do you think about someone who, under the same lighting conditions (so presumably the same degree of pupil dilation) will see the dress as blue & black at one time, but as white & gold at others? About an hour ago, I saw the thumbnail for the video, and the dress was blue & black. I watched a few other things, then scrolled back up, and the dress was now white & gold. I recall having much the same reaction when this image of the dress first came out. Sometimes it will change as I continue to look at it.
I have always seen the dress as light blue and gold/brown/olive (weird mix). I love that you experimented with dialating your pupils. I thought color is also a subjective & cultural experience. Another factor: screens (computer / tablet / phone -and even browser-) show colors differently. Finally I wonder: could sensory processing sensitivity play a role in the detection of colors / making a color correction? Anyway, great food for thought. Thank you for sharing!
I see the exact same colors you do! I remember seeing white & gold when it was on TV, but maybe that was more power of suggestion, since they only gave us two color combinations to pick from. I definitely never saw royal blue & black.
I've always seen it that way, too. I actually thought people were joking when they told me they saw anything but that when this image first started circulating.
I’ve always seen “that dress” as blue and black, but I was also aware that it was originally a very lousy photo with terrible lighting. I could understand why people might not see the same colors as me, because I knew just how lousy the photo was.
Yeah. The black and blue might have been the original colours, but (for me) it's easy to see how they can be interpreted as white and gold (especially the gold part) due to the lighting.
When I only focus on the top of the dress it appears white and gold, when I focus on the bottom of the dress (especially near the light) it turns blue and black and when I only focus on the middle of the dress it starts to turn blue and brown. Don't know what my eyes and brain are doing but this whole thing still interests me to this day.
I saw a video, I think it was last year, talking about it and for the first few seconds, I actually saw white and gold! I was so shocked and it went back to blue and black (how I usually see the dress since the photo first came out). I don't remember any other time seeing it as white and gold, so that was pretty interesting to me - esp the part when I experienced the colors change. :)
I think the critical question scientists *didn't* ask participants is, "Where is this dress?" Because when I saw it, I thought the photo was taken in a stand alone shop or strip mall, so I saw the bright area to the right as a window to a sunny outdoors, with the dress hanging in relative shadow. In other words, I was color-correcting for daylight, which usually is "cooler" than indoor lighting. But apparently this picture was taken in a shopping mall, under artificial light, with a nearby mirror reflecting light. I think people who interpreted the setting this way thus "saw" the dress as an overexposed blue and black dress, whereas those who thought the bright area was a window saw a shadowed white and gold dress. This makes me wonder if the "smaller pupils" were a sign of people who spent more time outdoors. Or maybe their pupils contracted slightly in conditioned response to perceived sunlight, while those who saw the dress as in a windowless mall store didn't. Sorting participants by whether they lived in a rural or urban area might have shown a correlation. Maybe. I'm not an optometrist, nor do I even play one on TV. I'm just layperson with an interest in both physical and social science. 🙂
I thought this was at an outdoor market, in bright sunlight, and saw the dress as black and blue. Also, daylight is usually a warmer tone than the kind of cool-white lighting used in shopping malls. Your comment makes no sense lol.
Regardless of what the actual color of the dress is in real life, what one sees is an image on a screen in certain lighting. If you select & isolate the pixels of this image in any image editing software, most of these pixels are closer to a muddy yellow/white, grey, light blue-grey... There are some black and blue too. So, it must be a combination of how sensitive our eyes are to color (cones) + how the brain processes the information (how we perceive colors next to each other, assuming certain light conditions, and whatever else)
@@mgratk Oh, OK. It is a lot of fun to talk about this picture of a dress 7 years later :) May I ask why would you want that info? I'm curios, what color do you see in the .jpeg floating around?
@@suf3481 I always have seen white and gold in that original picture. I'm just interested in the objective truth that measurement can provide. Although the interpretation by our brains is DEFINITELY the fascinating part.
I've seen gold and white for years. This morning I saw your video while I was scrolling through and saw gold and white as usual. But a couple hours later I was scrolling through videos and saw your video again and saw it as blue and black for the first time ever! And now I can't stop seeing it as blue and black!!
Absolutely love this video!!! Refreshing to see an optometrist`s take on this. That experiment you did at the end was also interesting, haha. You 2 are too funny. As for myself, I see this as black n blue even when you played with the lightning in Lightroom. Only when I saw the picture that was half in the sun and half in the shade, I could get a glimpse of the gold & white other people see. This is super interesting 😁
I see white and gold. I was actually very surprised that the theory was that naturally larger pupils could mean you're more likely to see it as blue and black. My pupils are huge, always been. Like your dilated pupils are my normal pupils and still I see white and gold and always have.
White and gold. I watched this on my phone & tried changing the angle, it's still W&G for me. I have brown eyes (Asian, like the presenter) and small pupils. I remember that when this issue came out, I looked at the dress on a computer and it was also W&G. Cheers!
For those seeing white and gold (like me), try the total OPPOSITE of what they tried in the video. Look at the image while squinting really tightly, or through a small pinhole in paper - especially at the lower half of the dress. You should be able to (or at least understand how others) see it as blue/black.
TheUKDave--- Squinting obscures real eyesight something like an injury would do...accurate colors cannot be seen this way. Can decreasing vision by squinting while also diminishing light cause visual color shifts? Yes. The kicker is how lots of people who don't squint see the dress in the opposite colors which you normally see it...& if they squint, they might see your version...I just haven't heard that yet. ...Also, interesting how this effect happens with the dress on the lower half...2 others mention the lower half as being a little different.
@@curtischildress9580 I wasn't suggesting we should see like the generally, or that it doesn't affect colour vision, or that people that see blue/black have squints ... I was just suggesting how some people might be able to 'realise' how it looks to others. And this reason this should kinda work, is because the image is over exposed, so darkening it can help to make the brain see it differently. You might even be able to achieve the same by reducing your sceen's brightness, which in a technical sense ALSO affects the colours it produces. Anyway, I believe the reason the bottom part of the dress is easy for us white/golds to deal with, is because the image is darker at the bottom. You can see the source of light top right, so bottom left is the darkest region - the least overexposed of the overexposed image. The 'white' part of the image, is actually objectively blue, just a very grey-blue, you can measure this yourself. The colour code of the top right shoulder is around 88A - so a mid grey, with equal parts (8) of red and green, and 11 parts blue. The lower left portion of the dress is more like 558, and the darker frilled horizontal edges reaching around 336. If you have a colour picker and/or know how to use an image editor, type in those colour values, you might be surprised how blue it actually is. Personally I can see the objective blueness of the dress, it's just not VERY blue, at all. What I understand less, is how anyone can see the top part of the dress (colour code 764), which is objectively browny gold, as black. This makes no sense at all to me 😆
@@theukdave2433 I followed every word of your very complete sensible comment. Here's the deal. When dealing with viewing this mind-blowing dress for real in person there are folks having this experience of truly seeing 2 different sets of colors...no cameras used, or squinting, no mechanics involved with viewing...just human eyes & minds reacting oppositely, nearly at a 50-50 percent rate seeing 1 color set or the other. Why??? Some folks told me about this dress deal & to mull it over. I recalled it from a few years ago but I'm not into pop culture...they assured me this was more than that, & it is. I need 1 other freaky situation like this dress viewing as a comparison before I can form a reasonable explanation...if this is an isolated event then it falls into being unique & alien, but sometimes that's an easy dissection because it's not corrupted by anything else, especially if it's an object for example, which the dress is an object...but there are 2 opposite human visual reactions to this object...hell, this is freaking rare, & if it gets figured out then a brand-new game of interacting with people's minds through imagery is born...there are companies crazy for such gimmicks to bring new products to the world, & the motivation behind that is the almighty dollar!!! ...We all like new spiffy things & we all like dollars! ...Thanks for the reply. Your comment was great.
You may want to check this according to dominant eye as well. I notice that I seem to see differences between each eye. Warm tones vs cool… I have also at times had one eye that has gone red green color blind at times, possible due to some neurological complications that I am currently living with. I recall first discovering that people see colors differently while in college and running some experiments with color sample swatches. IE: multiple swatches of a color like blue & asking which swatch seemed to be true blue, or in the range where it was not advancing into another color on the color wheel. The variation from person to person was quite dramatic & actually surprised me at the time.
I was wondering about that, because one time recently I closed one eye, and things looked more blueish just in general. I had to double check my glasses to make sure they weren't coated with something like those red-blue 3D glasses! I have a coating made for computers, but my eyes are slightly different.
Blue and Black - I tried to make myself see it as white and gold or at least see how others could see it as white and gold years back. I was the only one in a group of 6 that saw it as Blue and Black (I assumed I was the one that was wrong). Thank you for explaining it.
Thing is, no one is right or wrong in this situation. The visual cortex does a lot of processing (up to 6 different layers of it), which means everyone experiences and understands color slightly differently. Add in the color temp of the ambient light when viewing the image, the color temp of the screen it's being displayed on, and biological factors, and it becomes apparent that color is a very unusual concept.
Cheryl Rider...nothing truly explained in the video...much is hashed about as possibilities...what in the video convinced you your view of the dress was wrong? I also see it as black & blue plus everyone I've met see it the same way. Were the 6 folks in your group all from the same area? Something unique is conditioning specific folks to see this particular item 2 different ways which lean in very far opposite directions...not a weird quirk here, something is definitely happening...just don't know what. Folks told me to watch this video here & 4 others to see what I thought.
@@daily.fitness0 If you were made to see the dress colored differently, which would you believe is true? Would you trust what you normally see or trust what you're made to see?
Would you be able to do an experiment with people who are color blind, or don't perceive colors correctly? See what they see, or what colors they associated the picture with?
I saw it as white and gold, but I saw it from a certain context. It seemed like the background was a bright outdoor setting with overexposed harsh sunlight. Both the dress and the person photographing it were placed under a tent, and therefore were both having shadow cast on them. Shadows on sunny days are blue tinted due to the scattering of light in the ambient blue atmosphere hitting the spots that the direct sunlight does not, which makes it seem bluer.
I think this might be what the problem is. I can't understand how in the hell this is OVERexposed. Shouldn't the subject be the brightest object if that was the case? I see this as UNDERexposed. I too see a bright background with someone in a dark room. My brain assumes the subject should be even BRIGHTER. That the light blue is really white and the dark brown is really bright gold. Anyone who sees black/blue has somehow correctly assumed that the subject is too bright and overexposed. Those who see white/gold are assuming it's too dark and underexposed. The problem is that I just can't see how in the world this could possibly be overexposed. It looks so dark.
Dude this comment?? For the first time since i saw this damn dress, you made me grasp the concept of how anyone could possibly see white and gold!! I've tried to make my brain/eyes figure out how it could possibly be mistaken for white and gold, but my brain simply can't even attempt to understand the concept. But I think you've hit the nail on the head!! If I work really hard to tell my brain that this is an outdoors picture but the dress is under a roof in the shade, I can kind of see it! To me, I've never ever thought of this image as taken anywhere but inside a store, under the super bright fluorescent bulbs. The background are tables with folded/messed up clothes, the dress is clearly still on a hanger and whoever took the photo just grabbed it and held it up right there. The bright lights are lightening the dark blue of the dress to a lighter blue and warming up the black a bit. Looking at the dark coloured dress makes the background seem even brighter in contrast. - Never even crossed my mind that it can just as well be interpreted like you did! I'm honestly so thrilled that I have a (to me) satisfactory explanation I can grasp now, so thank you!!
I've always seen it as white and gold and I think your explanation is exactly why I have a hard time seeing it as black and blue. I *can* see black and blue if I stare long enough, but my first impression is always white and gold with some ambient lighting from the sky
@@TheEgg185 the background is overexposed (literally just white bloom), so you look at a dress in a room and behind it, there is the bright outside. Dou you see the outside underexposed? and therefore white and gold? Sorry if I couldn't follow you there. it just doesn't make sense to me that the dress should be even brighter / whiter as if it is under direct sunlight
I remember this image and actually saw it in both colours on the same day. I had it on my computer under office fluorescent lights and it was Gold and white. I then went to lunch on a bright sunny day. When I got back from lunch it was Blue and Black, I was sure someone had tampered with the image. After about an hour it returned to Gold and White.
You can pop the picture in a graphic program easily and invert (negative) the colours as they are complementary colours in the opposite side of the colour palette
Teacher of biology here. While teaching a unit on neurology, I found one of my students seems to genuinely lack lateral inhibition in the retina, so colours always look the same indepedently of surrounding colours, and he cannot see optical illusions caused by lateral inhibition like Mach bands.
It would be interesting to have that student contact Jay Neitz, a color vision scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, to find out more about that condition (e.g., how rare it is, etc.).
Fascinating that this has revealed this aspect of variations in the human visual system :D. For me I see it as a light mid-blue with a bronze-brown stripe, so it was interesting to hear you say that a certain percentage of people see that as I had not heard that before and had wondered why I saw neither of the commonly referenced colour pairings :).
I saw white and gold the entire time, except one time when you were showing the ipad with the image to your friend, it was at an angle and I saw blue black momentarily.
With my glasses on it was white and gold, with them off it was blue and black. The comment about pupil size is really interesting because I used to have larger pupils before I started wearing glasses - I have a significant plus. Without or not enough plus I immediately squint very heavily to shut out the light. This was soo interesting. Thank you.
As a painter, I genuinely cannot ignore the context of the lighting and environment 🥲 not to say I haven’t been tricked by nifty lighting or ambient occlusion, or even by clever color harmony. But I can’t even shift my vision to see white & gold at all, I really wish I could see it!!
Yeah you're talking utter crap, trying to show off to people for knowing the REAL colours of the dress. Literally the colours of the picture are white and gold. Put the picture in Paint, use the colour sampling tool and see what colours you get. I can GUARANTEE you that it won't be black and blue
@@marioluigi9599 people see the gold part as black, because the lighting in the back is very bright so maybe the sun changing the colour. The white part can be seen as blue, because in the image, it is just blue. If you use a sample tool you will get blue no matter what you try. In the shade, sunlight that reflects onto people makes it have a blue tone to it. Also happens when you turn your lights off and it is daytime.
@@-MXXI- alright it's white thats slightly tinted blue, whatever. You still don't make sense saying that you can't "shift your vision". That's just dumb. And it looks more like the dress is in the shadows in the foreground anyway, whereas the background is overexposed.
@@marioluigi9599 sort of? But that's kind of what I was saying, actually. I legitimately just sampled the colors and they are a blue grey & a dark yellow grey. I'm not saying that I'm better than anyone, I was trying to talk about how I can't turn off my perception of the ambient lighting scenario. I recognize the light as yellow, so it's automatic to me to subtract yellow from the colors in the picture mentally. I can't turn that off, but I think it is *genuinely* interesting that other people can. There are paintings where a grey color can look neon pink because of the colors around it. I've seen it & sampled it for verification too. Colors are relative to the light around them, and I actually think it's cool that some people can turn off the "relational lighting" or surrounding color harmonies
@@marioluigi9599 I can shift my vision to see it (although it's hard to do) but some people see that the background is over exposed and assume the black part is just gold tinted because of the sun, and match that up with the blue of the shadows then that's blue and black. I sometimes see white and gold, then u sometimes see black and blue and I cant easily switch it. Idk why I'm talking about a picture of a dress so much tho
I saw white and gold on the thumbnail and clicked on it because I was curious what the other combination is. I was surprised because I would never imagine it'd be blue and black
I have perfect color vision and with both the sun lit picture and the original black and blue dress to the left I can see both with white and gold wash of sunlight going through a black and blue dress. The gold color is probably coming from the type of density material the thread is made from. Meaning the fabric isn't a perfectly 100% black just like if you take one strand of hair it will be a much brighter color with a more silver or gold hue. That is probably why the dress looks white and gold because the thread is just painted with a fabric paint or dipped in color and the original fabric from the factory before colorizing the thread into blue and black, the thread is pure white and dark gold or bronze depending what material the thread is made from in the first place. No thread is naturaly black or any color (in this prize class of a cheap dress), you have to color them after the fact and then if you shine a strong enough light through the fabric, like the sun in the picture, you see the original thread color before colorizing, probably by color dipping the thread. People with better/wider color perception often have more variety in yellows and thus can see gold much better than others. With lower/narrow color perception things that look dark gold or dark yellow will just look black to them in most cases. Those who see the dress as white and gold or light blue/white and dark gold have better color perception and can see the difference between very slight change in color hue better than others. So to simplify if you take a blue sheet or anything thin and hold it to the sun it will lose more of its color the thinner the fabric is because there is less paint on the fabric "thread" than there is actual "polyester" thread. The color of the paint is just 35% or lower of the polyester thread mass and when sunlight pass through it and washes the color out the only color you will see is the 65% polyester true color (you normaly don't see) blended with the 35% (black/blue) paint. This makes sense because it looks almsot 35% black and 65% gold to me in the picture, and 80% white and 20% blue. People who see more white and gold have better accuracy for correctly working with colors for online media for tv and entertainment and any art with paint as the important factor. Some say if you have brown eyes you have less light coming into the eye and thus things look darker than if you have light blue eyes also, but don't know if this is true, could also be an additional factor.
Artists actually make use of this quirk in our vision all the time. It's often referred to as the 'relative color' of an object. The way our eyes perceive color and even the value (lightness or darkness) of something depends on what colors surround that object and how light/dark the colors are. That bit about lighting and it being cold or warm affecting the way we perceive the colors of objects in a scene, such as the dress, regardless of the so called 'true' color of the item, is something you'll find in many paintings, and making use of this is an important part of color theory as it can help bring a lot more life and a more organic or natural feel to a painting or any piece of art really, because it allows for much more nuance. Even middle value colors can seem much darker or lighter depending on if it is surrounded by a bunch of light colors or a bunch of dark colors. You can see this if you use a medium gray in a paint program and put it in the middle of a white circle vs a black circle. Artists using blue colors to portray shadows in a warm scene is a good example of relative color. Often the shadows are opposite to the color of the light. In the one image where the dress was in direct daylight, the shadows of the dress's folds looked bluish in color. yellowish warm light = cold shadow tones. This is also why using just plain grey or black for shadows feels more murky or icky looking, because in real life, you don't usually see pure black or even 'pure' grey tones. Even grey tones of shadows can be more cold or warm depending on the lighting. I never would have guessed though that the size of someone's pupil itself could cause such a change in perception of color, but when considering that lighting has such a huge influence on all aspects of vision, it makes sense.
Quite fascinating that the same thing happen to music theory or sound. Not 100% same but very similar in practical use. Human perceptions are so weird and interesting.
I always thought I had a form of colour blindness lol as navy blue looks black to me and black with navy blue just looks like two different shades of black. I have been painting since I was 4 I never went to art school so never learned about the colour wheel and such I was never interested, to me my art was to help me relax I only learned of the differences of the colours when I helped Mom to buy her art supplies as my Mom wanted me to join her while she went to art classes for company because I had been telling her all my life she could paint 😹. I used to mix my own colours from the primes, but for the class I had to have all these different tubes of colours 😹😹
I was seeing it black and blue last year, but suddenly I wondered abt it so I rewatched it and for a millisec I could see the white and gold image in the dress' colour!! I can assure you guys it looked really pretty in white and golddddd
I have the opposite problem. I always saw it as black and blue. Even in those overexposed pictures that can allegedly show how it can look white and gold, it still looks black and very light blue to me! If you know someone who saw black and blue, you should see if there's a way for them to see white and gold.
(Cool) white and gold here. I guess my brain is less agressive at correcting for white balance. Thanks for the experiment and the explanation! The photo apprearing at 4:07 was especially helpful. However, photography messes with with colurs (not enough dynamic range, white balance effects etc.) so another REALLY interesting test would've been a real life control test, looking at an actual dress and not just a picture. I suspect in a real life situation, there would be much less disgreement, if any, between people, even in very similar lighting conditions. I remember when I was a young kid, in the clothing shops, my grandmother used to take clothing and textiles to the window and to see colours under natural light, because the old fluoros were creating a misleading perception of colour. Obviously, not talking about modern department stores with no windows... ;-) The old fluorescent lights had a very bad CRI (Colour Rendering Index) and were sometimes made with only two phosphors while later modern ones had up to 4, giving a much more evenly balanced light spectrum.
I've always been in the blue & brown/gold camp. The colors I see are a sky blue and then a goldish brown. So when given the two choices I'd reason that it was probably a white dress with gold trimming taken with the white balance set to a blue kelvin range, but I've never actually seen it as white. Its always looked sky blue to me. But I don't see the black, I see the gold/brownish color.
I'm with you, except the gold/brownish leans more towards dark olive to me, but I can see all those colors in there. I've played around with my screen brightness but it doesn't make much difference to me. When it was on TV I remember seeing white & gold, but now I'm thinking that may have been more power of suggestion, since they only gave us two color combinations to pick from.
If you take the picture in some software like paint and extract and isolate the color on the dress, then the color of the dress in that picture is a light blue/brown goldish color.
I can see it as both, but it does depend on the light in the room. I naturally have quite large pupils and am very good with matching colors exactly. I am able to match things such as thread to the fabric exactly, despite not having the fabric with me. Same for paint matching.
I have a considerable experience with color perception because of my work specially when we were developing LED panels. This is the best video I've seen about this subject. Direct to the point. Congratulations. BTW: It's white and gold to me but in this video the white seems to have a blueish tint and the gold looks a little like brown. That's comprehensible as color temperature of my computer monitor surely have an influence in this.
Same, it’s a very blue white and a yellow, kinda light brown/gold color. So I kinda agree on the blue, but a very light blue. I’d be interested to see what the actual color values are in RGB…
@@ChiefBroady I took two small pieces of the image in the thumbnail of this video. Both on the upper middle side of the picture. Reducing to a one pixel image (it's the same as making an average of the pixels of the cropped pieces) gave me: For the white/blue crop: R=131; G=150; B=194; For the gold/black crop: R=112; G=93; B=50; As a reference, I made the same with a "gold" desktop background and got: R=211; G=183; B=85; It's pretty close to the the gold/black sample, just brighter.
I have looked at this image on all types of screens. It is only ever blue and black. Your eyes and your brain are just faulty. You were developing LEDs with those eyes? Yikes.
that's how it's always looked to me - the white is tinted blue and the gold is a bit muddy from it looking like it's in shadow due to a very bright backlight. but i cannot make it look the royal blue and black that the actual dress is, and the photo of the woman standing in direct sunlight absolutely blew my mind.
Me being an artist, detecting the background clues that change the perception of the image comes as second nature to me. The thing that drawing and painting teaches you is that you need to add a bunch of seemingly strange colors to get the proper illusion of lighting. The colors "gold" and "white" do actually exist in the photo, even if the dress is blue and black.
I mean,.. I’m an artist too, and I see white and gold. The background is completely overexposed and bright yellow, so I wouldn’t say it helps you recognize the actual dress colors… Edit: I can see black and blue if I crop it so it’s just the dress with no background
Same here. I never interpreted the question as "what color would the dress be if it wasn't overexposed" I always interpreted the question as "what color is the dress in these lighting conditions expressed in this photo", and that answer to me is light blue and brown, which can be objectively measured in a computer.
@@raettchen1988 that doesn't matter in terms of color theory, but yes I do. Also, looking back at the original comment... perceiving colors as other colors based off of their surroundings isn't even an artist's responsibility to recognize. It's the audience's instinct to recognize a desaturated green as red in a mostly green drawing. It's the artists responsibility to figure out that that color is actually desaturated green. In terms of the dress image, the actual colors in the picture are pale blue and brown, but the background is too bright and theres nothing else in the foreground to be able to properly tell how shadowed the dress it... my first response to seeing it was thinking that the dress was in really dark shadows, which would make the original colors white and gold. Other people recognize that the dress in the photo is actually overexposed with the background, and they are able to see it as blue and black. There is nothing in the foreground to give any hints to whether it is overexposed or in shadows, so there is no way to tell which it is using only the photo.
Okay so when this got big I tried to show how it worked and while I did not see white and gold, the color or hue did change after opening the saved picture the second time. The same thing happened for the screenshots I took.
When I bookmarked this video to watch later, the dress on the thumbnail looked white and gold. When I came back to watch it, it looked blue and black 😭
When I first saw a photo of this dress, I thought it was black and blue and could see the white and golden version when I rationally thought of it. Now I saw the thumbnail and it immediately looked golden and white to me, only to look a second later the black and blue again, and I couldn't see the golden and white anymore even if I rationally thought about it. So weird. (May I add, I've been painting since early age and my eyes have gotten a lot of practice on how different colors look on different lights. And also, people always say I have large pupils or that they dilate very quickly and noticeably.)
I have large pupils and I always see the dress as white and gold. If I spend too much time looking at the dress I can force myself to see the blue but the black always looks gold. I do remember thinking when I first saw the dress that the picture must be very blown out in a coldly lit setting. But still, I can also debunk that large pupils equals the preference for blue and black. Team white and gold forever!
Interesting. I see blue and black. If I stare just at the black, I can see it as gold, but no matter how much I stare at the blue, I can't see it as white.
Well, you are correct, when you spend too much time looking at it. If you bring the image to photoshop... the blue is indeed blue, although a very light blue. But the black is gold. Those are the actual colors of the image. People are too quick to say that the people that see blue and black are the ones that see things correctly, because the actual dress has those colors... But those are not the actual colors of the image itself. However, people forget that overexposing images is not how the eyes look at things. Our eyes do not overexpose the ways cameras do. So my guess is that people that are quite familiar at looking at overexposed photos, are usually the ones the brain changes the actual colors of the image to black and blue. And the whole pupil thing might just be a coincidence.
What drives me crazy is I used to see this dress as white and gold the first couple of times but after that I started seeing it as white and black. Even now, years later when I randomly come across the photo I still see it as blue/black. Why did I see it as white/gold the first couple of times?
pretty much every time they showed the picture it switched to the other color scheme. however, at the end i figured out how to change it to see white and gold or blue and black
What is interesting, is that I see light blue and gold. However, I am a professional artist, and have taken a few exams on how well I see color, and every time I have gotten way above average, and one of the color tests I got 100% of it right. So supposedly I am way above average at how good I can see color. Yet I have always seen it as light blue and gold, even when I was very young.... Confused on the whole situation, I decided to take the image to photoshop and look at the actual colors... and turns out I was right. The actual colors of the image are indeed light blue and gold. And when I isolate the rest of the image and just look at the dress, I see it precisely the same as I see with the background. If I isolate each color, I see it precisely the same.
My hypothesis, is that this is all about how familiar the person is with overexposed pictures. Because people forget that overexposing images is not how the eyes look at things. Our eyes do not overexpose the ways cameras do. So my guess is that people that are quite familiar at looking at overexposed photos, are usually the ones that the brain changes the actual colors of the image to black and blue. Because autocorrecting an overexposed image is not something that should come naturally. Because our eyes do not overexpose, it must be something learnt, via looking at plenty of images like that and the brain learning how to process it.
Honestly, pupil size still could be related. Someone who has always had larger pupils is probably much more used to correcting for overexposure in their brain considering their eyes have always received more light, and people with smaller pupils are probably more used to correcting for under exposure. If there are more factors in the eyes or brain structure that could lead to differences in perceived exposure vs actual exposure, that would probably be the next place to look. Maybe differences in the density of rods vs cones from person to person.
Blue and black. Covering the yellow tinted background looking away for some time and returning back to the image with the periphery still covered still makes my brain see blue and black.
I’ve always thought it had something to do with processing the whole scene. I’ve gotten really good at picking out colors. Even when that image originally started making the rounds, I was able to tell minute differences between colors. I have always seen it as black and blue. I’m no Hollywood-grade colorist or anything, but it was clear as day that the picture was in a warm daylight-toned environment and that the camera was getting cooked by that sunlight. So many of my friends saw white and gold, though, that I thought I might have some sort of color blindness and even considered getting my eyes checked.
The only instance that I saw in this entire video where the dress looked anything other than blue and black was the photo of the girl standing facing a window in direct sunlight--and that was only half the dress, which still seemed like gold was a stretch!
The most amusing thing for me is I see the colors constantly fading in and out, like I saw blue and black suddenly it faded to gold and white, sometimes even blue and brown. Also If I see one set of colors one time and replay the color, it's the different set of colors. Sometimes if I blink, the color changes. And at some speific points I could even control what color I wanted to see, not a joke. I want to see black and blue, blink, bam it's black and blue. It also happens if I move aroundfrom my screen, I go left or right, it seems blue and black, I look straight directly at it, it looks gold and white. Sometimes if I directly look at it, the different set of colors keep fading in and out and it''s driving me crazy. (I'm 15 and my pupils are pretty small btw if that's important) It keeps changing in real time help has someone else experienced this
Just a clue... On the left sleeve the shoulder area is almost disappeared. It gives us an idea of how much over exposed the photo is. The flash "ate" the shoulder. So we assume that the "real lige blue" was originally darker.
The light in the background led me to believe the image was over-saturated by sunlight, so I figured it had to be black and blue. With that much exposure, a white and gold dress would just be white.
When I looked at the thumbnail, the dress was white and gold. Then the dress was blue and black when I clicked on the video. I went back and looked at the thumbnail a second time and it looked blue and black. Trippy.
The actual spot sample of the photo though is periwinkle and ochre. Like if you do a dropper sample, those would be the rgb results. I "get" that people contextually misinterpret the garment, but if you're actually good at color matching you tend to see the literal spot sample within this particular bad photo. The whole illusion only works because it's a terrible photo to start with. I do a lot of photography and color matching games.
I don't know if it is necessarily the perception of warm or dark light; I think it could be the perception of where the light is coming from. Every time I look at this image, I perceive the light as coming from behind that dress. In other words, I perceive the dress as backlit. Well, if a blue and black dress was actually backlit, the black would look really black, and the blue would look like quite a dark blue. However, the actual color of the "black" ( if you zoom in on the pixels in isolation ) is nowhere near black, and the "blue" part of dress has pixels that are color much lighter than blue. So, a black and blue dress would not produce an image like the famous dress photo if it was backlit, but a white and gold one would, so if you think the dress is backlit you perceive it as white and gold. Conversely, if you think the light is coming from the front, you would expect the black and blue colors on the dress to be extremely washed out, just as they are in the part of the dress that are being hit by direct sunlight in the photo of the women by the window. Thus, if you think the light was coming from the front of the dress ( which it clearly was in this case ), you perceive the dress as blue and black.
Yeah, the difference in if people see reality or not. Anyone who sees white and gold should be dismissed from any job that dealing with reality is involved. They can’t see reality in a picture, what makes you think their entire life isn’t also not inline with actual reality? Their eyes and brain literally aren’t able to detect reality.
It's a scam. In the photo with the woman you can see how the sun lighted part of the hair still looks black, same for the building behind, completely sunbathed? It's still fucking black. At it's side (literally) the "black" in the dress is a completely different color under THE SAME LIGHT CONDITIONS. Hell, even in the shadows the "black" in the dress looks lighter (and weirdly yellowish) than the real black of the building getting burnt by direct sun... The blue? Same thing, it's white. Observe how the skin of the WHITE woman (again under same light conditions) is DARKER than the supposed navy blue of the dress, I repeat, under the same light conditions. Your jeans don't become whiter than your skin (assuming white race) under sunlight SPECIALLY if the skin is under the same sunlight.
Yep, forever white and gold for me - and even when I did the trick of looking at the bright corner for the photo for a while, the best I could get was a pale blue and sort of dirty brown. And thanks for 'taking two for the team' with the eye drops. There's no way you'd ever get me doing that - NOTHING AND NO-ONE gets near my eyes with ANYTHING, thanks very much!
Blue and black for me. I can understand seeing the gold, because at the top of the dress, where the light is especially bright, I can see the gold sheen. But I cant see white anywhere 😂. The white you see. It it pure white, or does it have a blue tint to it?
How anyone sees the color *Black* is crazy to me.. Inspecting the photo in my digital painting software it's indeed a mid level brown. However the white is definitely on the cool side. And when inspected it's as I suspected, a very pale blue.
@@colorsafebleach5381 if I had to describe it, at first look it feels like gray-ish white, like shadowed white? But now that I figured out how to see black and blue, I'd say the white part of the dress has a bit of a blue tint onto the already existing gray tone on the white. If you asked me how I can switch the colors I see by will, it's about recognizing the bright spots of light as completely independent of the dress, like some chunks of light that appear gold or white, than my brain magically realizes it's mistake and autocorrects.
@@JedHurricane yep, it is crazy how people see it differently. I too did the color sample test in photoshop, like you said, it is a slight brown color. But when I see the picture as a whole, it’s unmistakably black to me. Yes its washed out, but not washed out enough for me to think it’s gold.
@@za_arto it’s funny how you can correct your self to see it the right way. I was trying hard to see it the opposite way as well (white and gold) but I can’t. Even when I look at the photos of what the white and gold people see, I still see blue and black. Guess you can never fool my eyes in a color test!
When I first discovered that image when I was younger I saw it as white and gold. But one day it changed and since then I see it as blue and black. Has it happened to anyone else or is it just me?
It happened to me. It changed twice from black and blue to gold and yellow, the second time it did within my eyes. Since then it has remained gold and yellow.
I stared at it for several minutes, and watched it change very gradually. The blue slowly faded to a lighter blue, then a kind of pale violet, then finally white. At the same time, the black gradually took a brownish tinge, then became a dark chocolatey brown, then a warmer golden brown, and finally faded to gold. I usually now see it white and gold, but sometimes blue and black.
the problem with that troll image is that it actually had little to do with your eyes... it was an old worn out discolored dress in bad lighting. the point of that picture is that you should always be in good lighting when taking pictures, and take pictures of items that don't have washed out colors... (for those that don't know what im talking about, the original poster of the original picture posted more pictures of the dress where it actually looked blue/black in different lighting. those pictures however did not go viral because the miscoloring effect was gone when the pictures were taken in proper lighting)
I think part of why I saw white and gold is that my brain went "Oh that's a white background, disregard it" and looked at the dress while isolating it from the background. Since I'm often looking at digital images, they sometimes have black or white extra space around them for various reasons, and so I've been "trained" to ignore them.
I mean, I look at the picture and immediately see the drees before adjusting for the rest of the image. I’m also on my pc all day in similar roles as you. Your rational is incorrect.
I see white and gold. It amazes me that anyone can see black and blue. I’m wondering if it has something to do with the brain’s interpretation of the color somehow. Anyway between the 2 choices the dress looks prettier to me in white and gold! Now I’m wondering how many other things I’m not seeing the correct color?
@@vibaj16 no, the supposed black part is clean gold to my vision. Not dark gold. And it might be crazy for you, but we do see white. I thought this is a meme at first until years ago I dragged my little sister to look at the pic and she bluntly told me it's dark blue and black. Two completely different colour. I even drag real life colour sample for her. I took my dad's glasses case, which was gold-coloured and tell her "Those strip things over there? It's THIS colour" and she bluntly told me that it's not and it's black. My reality has been crumbling since then. Especially since my eyesight is the best in my family... But apparently my colour perception is not.
@@arthurmorgan2887 huh, weird. The black part is a kinda weird color to me: what I directly see is a sort of a sand/dirt colored brown, but looking at the overall picture I see it as a black reflective material reflecting the yellow sunlight. I wouldn't call the blue part a "dark blue". Look at the profile picture of the RU-vid account that messages you about youtube replies (it's a default profile picture). The blue of the dress to me looks like the background color of that profile picture
@@arthurmorgan2887 But maybe it's your perception is also the best because it's unbiased. Objectively there is dove gray color and golden brown, every editing app shows it. You see colours as it is on this picture without any context.
I immediately see and have always seen white/gold for this picture test thing. However, a few seconds later when glancing across the room I saw black/blue. Being a hunter you learn to look off center and to see clearer in low light situations as you the rod/cone ratio is different. Now when looking askance I can see the blue/black but it is still white/gold when looking direct. Pupil diameter being the key seems to indicate rod/cone ratios more than anything else. If you see white/gold try looking to the side and engaging more of the peripheral vision.
When I saw the original image way back when, I saw blue and black. I looked at it multiple times in different settings, different lighting, etc and only ever saw blue and black. The first image in your video is white and gold, though. I'm guessing the lighting/contrast in that version was manipulated cause the second image in your video (which appears to be the original photo) is blue and black to me, but still felt weird to finally see a white and gold version after never having seen it.
Did you rewind to the beginning after watching the whole video? I saw it as white and gold off the bat when I first watched this. I can't see white and gold anymore. I've rewatched this twice.
I figured the picture out. First, I was white and gold but I really wanted to see black and blue. So I tried different fillers, and finally found that if you go to edit picture and turn the Brightness to -100 you will see it as blue and black
I saw white and gold. To me it looks like there is a very warm light source from behind the dress, meaning the dress is in shadow, or back light. Being in the shadow makes it appear a bit colder because it would have received less warm light, making it blue-ish. However, I understand the argument of those who saw black and blue. If you perceive this dress as under the warm light, as opposed to being back lit, then it would have been blue and black. I think the tricky part is that there appears to be a mirror in the background reflecting the light source. Those who perceive the dress being backlit would say white and gold, and those who perceive it being in the light would see black and blue. Disclaimer: just my hypothesis, no data to report on that.
I still see it as gold, but now with a slightly blue tinted white. The picture where the lady was in part in sunshine and shadow was cool: I saw both color combinations in that one! That just goes to show how easily our eyes can be tricked 🙂
Intriguing! I have naturally large pupils -- very sensitive to bright lights, excellent dark vision -- and I see blue and black. For what it's worth, I also have extremely strong color differentiation, so I'd be interested in seeing if there is any correlation to that.
Interesting. I have some of the same. But the glasses I have reduces those problems so I see both depending on whether I have them on or not. And yes the light sensitive me sees blue and black.
When this picture went viral I was looking at it many times. I always saw it as blue and black, but remember one time that immediately after waking up, I saw it as white and gold. This only lasted a few seconds and after blinking a few times it was back at blue and black. I was never able to go back seeing it as white and gold and it feels like for a short time I took the red pill.
I have never been able to see the dress as white and gold, but I think the closest I can get is when I cover up all the bright background and just focus on the dress. The light temperature is less specific when I look at it like that and I can tell my brain that it’s cool lighting instead, and I get close to seeing it. For me it’s ALL about the bright background. I know that the colors can correspond to white and gold, but the bright warm background doesn’t let me see it any other way
I can see gold at the top of the dress with a lil squinting but the white just baffles me, it's so obviously blue (to me anyway). I really like these "illusions"
