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It seems like everyone in the world has weighed in on the dress. So much that the #TheDress has been trending worldwide for much of the last day.
After a woman in Scotland posted the picture on social media, a debate of sorts broke out. Some people saw the colors as black and blue, while others were adamant that the dress was white and gold.
The actual dress is black and blue, but the way that the light reflected led to different perceptions of the colors.
There’s science behind the reason why some people see black on blue while others are just as certain that they see gold on white.
The simple answer is that the picture is an optical illusion.
Objects reflect light at certain wavelengths, or colours, and the human brain determines the colour of an object by taking in its reflected light. But this perception can be thrown off balance by the colour of nearby objects.
With the photo of the dress, the surrounding colours are so muddled that the brain isn’t sure what to make of the dress itself.
As Wired.com points out, a digital analysis of the dress photo shows that one of the spots of black trim is actually orange in the photo.
Thus, people who perceive the surrounding area as dark are likely to see the blue in the dress as white and the black colours as gold. It all just depends on the manner that the brain perceives and processes colour.
Jay Neitz, a University of of Washington neuroscience tells Wired: ‘I’ve studied individual differences in colour vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.’
What do you see?????
