Is That Dress White and Gold Or Blue and Black?

HughPickens.com writes Color scientists already have a word for it: Dressgate. Now the Washington Post reports that a puzzling thing happened on Thursday night consuming millions — perhaps tens of millions — across the planet and trending on Twitter ahead of even Jihadi John's identification. The problem was this: Roughly three-fourths of people swore that this dress was white and gold, according to BuzzFeed polling but everyone else said it's dress was blue. Others said the dress could actually change colors. So what's going on? According to the NYT our eyes are able to assign fixed colors to objects under widely different lighting conditions. This ability is called color constancy. But the photograph doesn't give many clues about the ambient light in the room. Is the background bright and the dress in shadow? Or is the whole room bright and all the colors are washed out? If you think the dress is in shadow, your brain may remove the blue cast and perceive the dress as being white and gold. If you think the dress is being washed out by bright light, your brain may perceive the dress as a darker blue and black.

According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. "It's entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It's seeing one reality, but knowing there's another reality. So you're becoming an observer of yourself. You're having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that's the basis of imagination." As usual xkcd has the final word. It would make the comments more informatively scannable if you include your perceived color pair in the title of any comments below.

Comments

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[drinkypoo]

When I see stuff like that, my brain corrects the image for me.

Are people who are seeing this dress as weird colors just defective?

(I'm defective in other ways, like a lack of modesty, and some respiratory issues, let's not get all twisted here)

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw it as hot pink and emerald green.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling that to my psychiatrist, and that's why I'm typing this from a padded cell.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[EvilSS]

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.

Here is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.

Something is wrong. You said "pretty good explanation" but you then linked to Gizmodo. These two things are mutually exclusive.