The science behind the blue/black, white/ gold dress phenomenon?

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

There is the photo. Some see the dress as being gold and white, like I do and some see it as blue and black.

No clue why this is the case and why it’s those two specific colors exactly.

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your eyes and brain do a lot of automatic “color balancing” where they figure out the actual color of an object based on the color your eyes see and the lighting. This is how you can, for example, park your car during the day under broad daylight and still identify it when lit by a streetlamp at night. The actual wavelength of light coming from the car is totally different, but you instinctively compare that light to other light near the car and figure out what the color _would_ be under standard lighting.

For example in this picture http://brainden.com/images/color-cube.jpg the labeled squares are all the same color on your computer screen, but your brain interprets them differently because it knows that in the real world the tile in shadow would have to be much lighter than the tile in the light to have the same apparent color.

The dress, because of the quality and the framing of the picture, sits _right_ on a knife edge where our brains aren’t sure how to interpret it and different people see it differently. As I noted, we interpret color based on the surrounding lighting…but what if people’s brains jump to different conclusions about what the background lighting is? That’s what’s happening here. If your color-balancing function in your brain thinks that the dress is being lit by blue light, then it will send you “gold and white” for the color because gold and white lit by blue light look like what you see in the picture. On the other hand, if your brain thinks the dress is being lit by yellow light, it will send you “blue and black” because blue and black lit by yellow light _also_ look like what you see in the picture. So you get a different color depending on your interpretation, and the picture is such that people get different interpretations. This bit happens subconsciously, so people don’t realize why they disagree.

Here’s some comparison pictures sort of illustrating the idea

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/35/0d/8f/350d8fdc2f5b900d2da2740e9effd583.jpg

https://collegian.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-04-at-6.31.05-PM.png

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