Why We'Re Fascinated By The Blue-Black, White-Gold Dress Big Think

Table of Content

• Fans Think Kate Middleton Just Honored Princess Diana In This Significant Red Coat
• Is #TheDress white and gold or blue and black? Rice expert on visual perception weighs in
• The Black and Blue, White and Gold Dress
• Mono Zebra Print Midi Dress
• White And Gold Or Black And Blue: Why People See the Dress Differently
• White and gold dress: Here's the science behind why some people see blue

But even when it's the same photograph, some people see blue, and others see white. So we can recognize the same objects in different light conditions, our brains tweak the way we see things, he added. The dress was identified as a product of the retailer Roman Originals, which experienced a major surge in sales of the dress as a result of the incident. The retailer produced a one-off version of the dress in white and gold as part of a charity campaign. The photoreceptors convert light rays into nerve signals, which are then processed by nerve cells in the inner retina, sent to the brain, and translated as images.

Lacking L or M cones has minimal impact on perceived dress colors while a lack of S cones yields a very different perception suggesting a primary role of the S cone input in perception of the Dress. The Dress as seen on the internet shown in A and the actual blue and black dress is shown in B. C shows an extracted image of the Dress consisting of vertical stripes of decreasing spatial frequency that was used in the present study to explore perception of the dress with limited contextual cues. Because your brain automatically converts blue-ish short-wavelength light into white and gold light, you would now assume that the dress was in the shadow of nature. As a result, the image became more yellow in hue, hence the dress’s classification as white and gold. The photo sparked confusion, anger and fascination, because despite the dress definitely being blue and black, to many, it appeared gold and white.

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Find show stopping graduation dresses that suit your personality. Add some flair to your weekday outfits with our work dresses. Whether it is an interview or a business meeting, a smart formal dress always makes a lasting impression. Browse through our lovely collection of dresses at Target to find your pick. When looking at a photo of it, some people see it as gold and white, while others see it as blue and black. There's a scientific explanation for why #TheDress looks black and blue to some people and white and gold to the others.

However, the dress surely reflected the same amount of light for everyone, so it was clear that the difference arose later, once an individual’s brain began processing the wavelengths. Some perceived it as blue-black, while others saw it as gold and white, and a small margin of people even saw it as brown and blue. According to the most recent internet sources, it now appears the dress really is blue and black. The mystery may be solved, but the fascination with how we all see the dress differently continues. "If you put a color meter up to the 'white' portion of the dress, you'll see in the red, green and blue readings that there's a bit more blue than red or green; in that sense the dress is blue. But it could have been white under blue illumination." For example, if you stare at a gray object and make the gray increasingly yellow or blue, then you’re more likely to see the object as yellow than as blue.

Is #TheDress white and gold or blue and black? Rice expert on visual perception weighs in

In the days after “The Dress” was posted online, a group led by psychologist Karl Gegenfurtner at Giessen University in Germany asked 15 people to view the photograph on a well-calibrated color screen under controlled lighting. The participants then had to adjust the color of a disc to correspond to the colors they saw in the photograph. For the lighter stripe, participants reported seeing a continuous range of shades from light blue to dark blue, rather than white and blue, the two dominant colors reported so far. The human brain assumes that natural or artificial light is reflected by the item in the photograph and compensates for that perception by assuming the surroundings are also natural or artificial.

The second part of seeing, Haller says, is that “information from the retina is sent via the optic nerve to the brain.” In the brain, contextual processing occurs — this is why colors may look different at different times of the day. “There are differences in ambient light and interpretation, and the brain will weed out things like reflectants and changing bits of data,” she says. "For some reason, this particular photo and the lighting is throwing off that normal process, and magnifying the difference." I'm not a relativist; I'm not saying there is no way the world is. There are definite facts about the world and they are discoverable. The only thing that is blue and black or white and gold is people's experiences.

The Black and Blue, White and Gold Dress

The researchers further found that if the dress was shown in artificial yellow-coloured lighting almost all respondents saw the dress as black and blue, while they saw it as white and gold if the simulated lighting had a blue bias. The truth is the colors of the dress in the photograph are a murky brown and a greyish lavender. Whether you see the dress as blue and black or gold and white depends on how your brain is interpreting the scene.

But experiencing it and seeing the white and gold as well, was eye opening. If you see white and gold your eyes don’t work very well in dim light so the retina rods see white making them less light sensitive which causes “addictive mixing” of green and red which make gold. "What's correct is that the dress itself, which is for sale online, is actually blue," he said. "That means that the lighting under which the photograph was taken must have been a fairly good white – that is, an even mixture of all wavelengths or colors—and thus a flat spectrum." At this point it appears to be just how your eyes adjust to the mix of colors. If your eyes are more sensitive to blue and black, that's what you see; if they are more sensitive to the lighter colors, that is what you see.

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Other contextual knowledge may come into play, for example you are drinking coffee by the window at dawn. It makes sense for the light to be red-tinted as the illumination source is the sunrise. All of our perceptual experiences are informed by this kind of processing, resulting from context and previous knowledge. The dress illusion presented a rare opportunity, as the illusion was related to color. Color is the wavelength or frequency at which light is reflected off a surface.

The brain works to subtract out the extra yellow, in other words to compensate for the colors present in the light rays of the illuminant in order to yield our ultimate perception. Our visual system discounts the information about the light source so that we process the colors of the actual object being viewed. “It caught fire because it was a case in which color wasn’t doing what we expect,” says Conway, who teaches at Wellesley College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.