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Colour optical illusion
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this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Goddam! Thank you!
That kind of explains the gold or black dress!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
I can for the life of me only see it as white and gold, and I have really struggled trying to understand how others can see it as blue and black? I bet the picture you show here is a result of the research the picture of the dress initiated. It can't be a coincidence that the illusion you posted also is made with dresses.
when I clicker the link I saw it as black and blue for a split second but all I see now is golden and white 😭😭😭😭
Huh, I checked the talk page out, turns out the guy behind the picture was jailed for trying to kill his wife.
It's such a strange thing. For most of the illusions I can trick my brain to perceive both variants. This one is clearly black and blue. I can see that the black parts isolated can appear golden in the light, but for the life of me I can't see it any other than blue. Brains are weird.
I wonder how much of this depended on the differences in device screens. In 2015 there was a lot more variability in display technology, lower resolutions in general and worse color fidelity. OLED was uncommon and expensive, you probably only had an IPS display if you worked in graphic arts, and a lot of people were still using standard LCD monitors backlit with fluorescent tubes, which meant that the black depth was limited and the detail in dark regions of an image was frequently not visible on the screen.
I remember showing a woman at work it, from my phone. She saw it as the opposite to me and another coworker. Me and the other coworker were stunned.
Just looked up the origonal dress pic on my pixel 8 pro. Its still white and gold to me. I've only ever seen it as black and blue (without aid) a handful of times since the day it went viral. In sure screens could influence this, but this damn thing stands as a powerful illusion on its own.
In the drawing, the surrounding background and the hard black lines on the lighter version are probably causing that we don't compensate the light in the same way in both drawings. We are not given the same picture like it happened with the original photo.
Yes and they are extremely flawed too.
The only reason we think we are smart, is that every other life-form we know of is even stupider.
To be fair, we’re the ones who makes the definition and therefore can make them fit our, in many cases, fragile ego. We’re only the most intelligent animal because our definition of intelligence is based on our self.
True, luckily many modern researchers are less biased. A lot of the bias is from religions, that claim that humans are special.
From modern research we now know that we are not special in many many aspects. Apart from being a bit more intelligent, we are clearly the same in more ways than we are different.
The dress was revealed to be, in fact, blue and black.
Oh man, MAJOR missed opportunity there! They sold out of the blue and black ones like overnight, they should have fast-tracked a white and gold version production to hit the shelves ASAP and enjoyed the flood of purchases.
Anyone with eyes and half a brain would know from the original photo 10 years ago it was black and blue. You can see the severity of the contrast in the photo that would suggest the colour was manipulated.
I still cannot believe this many years later there are still people so absolutely disillusioned that they see "White and Yellow".
Get your eyes checked, people.
Yes that's kind of part of the link I gave.
But if you take a color picker, you can clearly see the RGB values from the image to match white and gold.
I did the color picker thing too, and its result was blue and orange. Not super helpful to this particular global controversy, but was worth a shot.
IMO the color of the actual physical dress is kinda moot: photographed (poorly), digitized, and presented to the world on billions of screens with completely different settings for things like color saturation, and the color of the thing that hits our eyes is not necessarily indicative of the color of the original.
The color of the dress in the photo was not the same as the color of the photographed dress.
It was white and gold! sprints away
It was a whole thing in my lab when it went viral, and I wasn't on any social media at the time, so someone brought up the picture and asked me what colors I saw, and I said "blue and goldenrod, why?" I still see a light blue and a goldenrod, almost orange ib the fucked-up viral picture.
😋
Correct interpretation: blue and black in an overexposed image
Misinterpretation: yellow and gold in an underexposed image.
The area of the picture that isn't the dress is washed out in white and the overexposure is even bleeding over top right corner.
Anyone misinterpreting must either be bad with visual context or not understand photography.
My issue with this illustration vs "the dress" is that in the dress, the background is bright, not a darker blue.
In theory, this illustration just serves to show that nobody should be seeing "the dress" as white and gold. Thy do, and that breaks my brain, but I still feel that there is no logical way for that to be justified (and yes, I read all the research).
I still don't get it
It was only after following elaborate instructions: change the brightness, squint, and cover up this section of the image, that I was finally able to see a white dress.
As stupid as it was, it was a pretty cool accidental worldwide psych experiment.
tilt your phone until almost parallel to ground and look at it from eye level
I tried, it doesn't make the slightest difference. But thanks anyway.
this does it for me but I guess depends on the phone screen
I don't understand why people are arguing about a terrible picture. The colours are blown out. So you could misinterpret them as badly lit white and gold.
Were arguing. This happened about 10 years ago, so keep the quality and variance of computer monitors at the time in mind. That, and the average person doesn't know what color balance/contrast is. Plenty of people don't even realize that the same image can look different on two different monitors.
Perception is an element of intelligence, and a fundamental part of consciousness.
The original dress really was ~~white~~ black and blue. For some reason, I thought it was confirmed otherwise.
Apparently this is the same dress, the colour balance of the one on the left is just that fucked up.
This is the one. People made some color edits to make it more obvious too. That being said I'm still suspicious of anyone who looks at the left picture and can only see black and blue... No way José. I can't convince my brain to see it even when I know it's there.
I can't understand anyone who can look at the left dress and think that it's a dark picture in the shadows.
All the "explanations" basically say the same thing. Those dress shades appear to be white/gold in the context of a dark or dimly lit room.
Which the photo clearly is not. It's so damn bright the entire background is washed out, and light is even spilling over from the background over the dress.
I guess it depends. Are people looking at the left image and going "Yep, that is definitely a dark black and navy blue"? Using a colour picker, the darker areas show up as somewhere around #7a6642, which definitely isn't the black #231e16 we see on the right. Same with the lighter spots: we're seeing something around #8596bb, which again isn't the navy blue of #3a45c3
Quite simply, I cannot make the dress in the left image look like the dress in the right, even if the dress in those images are supposed to be identical.
Reread the wiki page about it. The dress was black and blue.
Wait. For real? I WAS RIGHT?! I was under the impression that I saw it wrong.
Wikipedia says the original dress was blue/black.