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Who remembers this?
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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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I'm still convinced this is the biggest troll. It's clearly white and gold
You can literally sample the rgb values and see it's blue and black
Edit: am I part of the joke here??? It's clearly blue and black...
The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.
But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.
"The phenomenon revealed difference in human color perception..."
Yes, you're becoming a part of the joke. People LITERALLY see the dress differently. It doesn't matter what the objective facts are. TBH, it says a lot about humanity. Even when we have evidence that subjective experiences can vary, and even contradict each other, we still end up arguing over whose viewpoint is "correct".
That we’re curious problem solvers?
Anyway, science has determined that my way is most based
Speak for yourself. I'm a solvem probler.
clearly some problems need to be taken from behind
Solve me Daddy
Optical illusion innit
If anything, I'm more interested in how THAT color is being interpreted than the dress itself. Does it become shade to people because they perceive it relative to the dress? Because, I mean, we know that it is factually light. So how are people perceiving it to be the absence of light? Can you explain that bit?
The brain doesn’t just read raw brightness; it interprets that brightness in relation to what it thinks is going on in the scene.
So when someone sees the dress as white and gold, they’re usually assuming the scene is lit by cool, natural light — like sunlight or shade. That makes the brain treat the lighter areas as a white-ish or light blue material under shadow. The darker areas (what you see as black) become gold or brown, because the brain thinks it’s seeing lighter fabric catching less light.
You, on the other hand, are likely interpreting the lighting as warm and direct — maybe indoor, overexposed lighting. So your brain treats the pale pixels not as light-colored fabric, but as light reflecting off a darker blue surface. The same with the black: it’s being “lightened” by the glare which changes the pixel representation to gold, but you interpret it as black under strong light, not gold.
Hey, just arguing with you in a different comment chain now. So, like, I see the optical illusion. But the background is clearly yellow in the picture? So I don't understand how your brain is interpreting that part? To me it seems like you're ignoring the background of the image for this point. Can you go more in depth on that part, specifically? Does that yellow light look blue to you?
Looks like a sunny background and that the dress is in the shade
So the idea is that the dress is, what, covered in an exactly dress shaped and sized amount of shade? Or else why wouldn't we see shade anywhere else?
Because shade works in 3D and it's not clear how far away the background is from this picture. But yes, 'dress shaped and size amounts of shade' exist; trees, could be on a shaded balcony, etc.
Maybe I'm just an elevated being but I can clearly tell that the righthand side is a mirror on a wall and that the tan below it is where the floor meets the wall. Because of that, I can roughly make out the angle and know that we should be seeing some shade on the side if any existed in the first place.
Does that make sense?
I dunno. It’s clearly a blue and black dress in a washed-out photo.
I guess I’m just used to seeing washed-out photos, and mentally adjusting the “whitepoint/exposure” (I’m not a photographer) in my brain or whatever.
I have washed out Polaroids from my childhood, so. I don’t think there’s any great mystery here.
The lighting of the room is clearly yellow. The black stripes look to be a very glossy material, which when lit with yellow light reflects goldish. There's no way that lighting turns a white dress blue.
What room? It looks like we're looking at the back of an object that's facing out into bright sunlight.
Whatever the setting is, it appears to be bathed in bright sunlight. That's the important part.
The front of it presumably is. But the back, that we're looking at, seems to be in shade.
You’re good. It’s black and blue. At a pinch, maybe blue and black.
What is global illumination from sky lighting again ??
Where the hell is the black supposed to be? Nothing is that dark here. I can easily accept blue, white, or gold, but there's clearly no black.
It's very clearly white and gold.
It doesn't matter. This phenomenon can be explained by something called color constancy.
I remember some versions of this image where I could literally switch between perceptions at will, when I imagined different surrounding light temperatures/environments.
It's a subjective perception.
You can sample the colours and see it’s white with a very light blue tinge and gold.
People who see it as blue and black are (correctly in this case) auto-correcting for the yellow light as the dress itself is black and blue.
Whereas people who see it as white and gold are (subconsciously) assuming a blue shadow and seeing the pixels as they’re displayed.
You selected the brightest highlights on the dress. I selected more average colors here. I also included WHITE AND GOLD next to the selected colors, so you can see what they actually look like. Are you really saying that blue is white and brown-grey is gold?
Well you would select the brightest bit to get an idea of the bit that was least impacted by the shadow.
But yes still closer to white and gold than (dark) blue and black
Same, I always assume the ppl. Saying it's black and blue are trolling me.
Stop trolling me. It's blue and black. I could never figure how people might perceive it otherwise.
They see the blue as shaded white, and the glossy black has enough yellow reflected in it that they think it is shadowy gold. Basically, you’re seeing the dress as if it’s lit from the front. You see the colors as blue and black, because that’s what’s on the screen. But other people’s brains decide that the dress is backlit, so the colors facing the camera are actually shaded.
I've always really liked this explanation image you can find on Wikipedia page for it. Essentially, people who see white and gold are mistaking the lighting to be cold and blue-tinted, rather than warm and yellow-tinted.
The portions inside the boxes are the exact same colors, you can easily check this with a color picker.
As in using the colour picker on the image and finding the corresponding code? That's actually an explanation that I can get behind. Classic example of trust your instrument.
I see the dress as gold and white, no matter ehow hard I try to see the other side of the coin.
I don't understand this, can you explain it?
In the left I see a black and blue dress with a yellow box. The dress inside the box is still black and blue (with yellow tint).
In the right side I see a white and gold dress with a blue. box. Inside the box the dress is white and gold, with a blue tint.
What am i supposed to see here? What is this telling me?
The black and yellow colors inside the boxes are actually the exact same color, and the same goes for the blue and white colors inside the boxes (which is what the seamless bars connecting them is there to demonstrate). But they look completely different, right? The picture is showing us two different ways the exact same colors can be interpreted differently depending on the context surrounding it.
If you go to my profile and look at my comment before this one, I posted two slightly edited versions of the image that better show how they're the exact same color.
The way this connects to the original image of the dress, is that some people see a gold and white dress because they think the dress is in blue-tinted lighting, as though they were standing in shade. People who see an overexposed image with a bright yellow tint, on the other hand, will likely see a blue and black dress. I couldn't tell you why it happens, but it's the way our brains perceive the lighting that's doing it.
If theyre the same color, why can i see the black outlines way clearer in the yellow dress w/ blue tint side ?
That would be because the outlines themselves are not the same colors, just the blue/white and black/yellow sections. Here's an image I quickly edited with the outlines and skin removed, so you can see just how much an effect they have on the image. Both dresses still look normal, but they no longer look like completely different colors when compared together this way.
(edit): And here's the same image with the outer boxes removed, to show how much the lighting is affecting things, where one of the dresses just looks completely wrong to me now.
I feel so dumb, you did such good work on this and… OK maybe I’ll just take another look in the morning and it’ll make sense
I never understood this concept until you made the outlines the same. That's the tip i needed to get over the edge. Thanks!
But the dress in the photo looks like it's in the shadow so it's a fair assumption that the lighting would be blue-tinted.
How does it look like it's in a shadow? The rest of the photo is over exposed like in bright lights so it's safe to assume that the dress is over exposed too.
Ah, so white and gold folks are, indeed, mistaken.
Thanks!
Incorrect. It is impossible to deduce the "real" color from the photo, both sets are true.
The photo is simply bistable.
You can argue that "the real dress bla bla bla", but nobody's looking at the real dress and everyone's looking at the photo.
This has been known for almost as long as the picture has been around. Still doesn't allow me to see it.