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What Color Is That Dress!?

WHAT COLOR IS THAT DRESS?!!? Technically it’s black/orange and blue, but if it is white and gold to you, blame evolution.

Alright Internet, let’s all take a collective deep breath and think about this. Why do some people think this now infamous dress is black and blue and others white and gold? Well, it definitely has something to do with a poorly processed photograph in bad lighting, but it has more to do with a special combination of colors and your brain.

As I explain in the video above (building on another explanation offered by the crack photo team at WIRED), the Internet is having a collective freakout over something pretty special — this dress and the picture that depicts it has found a very fine boundary boundary in our visual processing system, which evolved under very specific conditions.

Or maybe not. We are bound to see a hundred articles about color perception tomorrow, but for what it’s worth, Photoshop itself weighed in:

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Comments

  1. Silvee says:

    Looks blue and gold to me

  2. Brian says:

    Thank you! And now for an encore, could you tell us whether #GamerGate is really a consumer revolt over bad gaming journalism or just part of rape culture and the patriarchy. 

  3. Nat says:

    I see blue and black but my kids see white and gold weird but we got a good laugh out of it.

  4. JUS7IAN says:

    Kyle, No.  All in a days work though, huh.

  5. Alex says:

    Well, this is the answer! Hope it helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxHD7z_4zoA

  6. meysam says:

    Go to this website to see how many people in the world see the dress like you:
    http://www.Voteofworld.com

  7. Lisa says:

    I get confusing the blue for white depending on the lighting, but I can’t see where someone would be seeing black on that dress.

    • Erin says:

      It’s not actually black if you’re talking pantone, more like you know that it is black lace from how it looks, so even though it’s more of a brownish shade due to being washed out you say “black.”

  8. meysam says:

    Go to this website to see how many people in the world see the dress like you:
    http://www.Voteofworld.com

  9. meysam says:

    Go to this website to see how many people in the world see the dress like you:
    http://www.Voteofworld.com

  10. lordvicodin says:

    No, the audio is DEFINITELY gold and white.

  11. Erin says:

    The actual dress is blue and black. The picture was just taken with a crappy camera with a bright flash that washed it out. And the colors pulled from the two blue (really, it is like periwinkle) sections are exactly the color of the area behind them, not like some little tiny spot they pulled.