This Dress is Blowing Up the Internet – Is It Blue and Black or White and Gold To You?

So today if you’re going through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram, you are bound to stumble on a picture of this dress. It is having everyone’s mind blown because not everyone is seeing the same colour even though it’s the same picture.

At first, i thought it might be a HUGE troll post or a play of the mind, but when my sister asked me about it, and we both disagreed on the colour (me, seeing it as white and gold, and her as blue and black), my mind was equally blown, right after i made sure she wasn’t just trolling her own sister.

The picture of this dress is spreading on social media like wild fire, and still there are no confirmed explanations yet as to why some people see differently. Even Adobe chimed in on the viral debate:

A statistic on buzzfeed showed that 75% of people viewed it as white and gold, while the remaining see it appear as blue and black.

Many were so boggled that they took it upon themselves to figure it out by applying the picture with inverted colours. Now the dress appears totally white and gold, which should not be the case if it was white and gold to begin with.

Some even found the dress online, displayed on Amazon, where it’s colours were actually.. well, blue and black.

Causing a huge commotion on the Internet, Tumblr users asked the orignal poster for more pictures and the post showed that it IS INDEED a blue and black dress.

The most logical reason behind this would be due to our brain interpreting light that is coming into our eyes.

“We are always making decisions about the quantity of light that comes into our retina,” said Cedar Riener, an associate professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College.

“This light, called luminance, is always a combination of how much light is shining on an object and how much it reflects off of the object’s surface”, he added.

“In the case of the dress, some people are deciding that there is a fair amount of illumination on a blue and black (or less reflective) dress. Other people are deciding that it is less illumination on a white/gold dress (it is in shadow, but more reflective).”

This logic can be demonstrated in one of the most popular optical illusions, where checker A and B appear to be different when they are actually the same.

Well I don’t know about you, but that’s enough Internet for me today.