It's dividing workplaces, friends and even couples. And society can't seem to decide why we're seeing that famous dress so differently.
The debate started Thursday night and was still raging Friday about the blue and black (or white and gold?) $77 dress from British clothing retailer Roman Originals.
As they got over the inanity of the questions, the experts started weighing in.
I've been asked to give a comment on #TheDress. This may be the first time a physicist has been called upon for their views on fashion.— Dr Paul Coxon (@paulcoxon) February 27, 2015
Here are five different ways it's been explained.
The neuroscientist
“What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College, told Wired. Daylight changes color over the course of the day, he said.
“So people either discount the blue side [of the daylight], in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.”
For the record, Conway sees it as blue and orange!
The vision scientists
Bart Anderson, a vision scientist from the University of Sydney, told New Scientist he believes it could boil down internal bias. "People may have different estimates of the color balance -- i.e., what counts as 'neutral,'" he says.
Another vision scientist from the University of Rochester in New York told Live Science that it's all about illumination.
"I think the brain has just made a different assumption about how the dress is being illuminated," David Williams said, arguing that it's not because of a fundamental difference in color vision.
The photo editor
The photo is overexposed. That's the verdict of Mashable's photo editor, and here's the gif that explains it:
More details here.
The animator
Why you're confused about #TheDress: The brain uses familiar objects to determine color space and that photo has none pic.twitter.com/UBdk166zTK— Tyler Kupferer (@TylerKupferer) February 27, 2015
Without a human, color calibration card, or other familiar object in the background, we have no way of knowing the light cast on the object— Tyler Kupferer (@TylerKupferer) February 27, 2015
And your brain is trying desperately to guess what the context is. It can go back and forth endlessly, so please Internet, #DontPanic— Tyler Kupferer (@TylerKupferer) February 27, 2015
The Internet nerd cartoon
XKCD has weighed in with a drawing that shows how the same dress can appear differently depending on what our brain sees as the surrounding colors:
