I know I'm wrong, but it's just staring at me gold & white. It's right there, clearly, and I don't know how to explain it to those who see it the other way.
I can't really See einher white and gold nor black and blue.
It's more a baby blue and brownish to golden color for me. Can't really say it's black or white at all
If I remember from the first time this came around it had a lot to do with how your eyes interpreted the lighting in the image. Try putting it away then looking at it in different light settings and often it allows you to see the other one.
Looks to me like a white and gold dress that's being shaded from the ambient light. In reality, it's a black and blue dress with a yellow light cast on it.
Your mind naturally tries to compensate for color shifts caused by light. For example, a white car still looks white to you at sunset and in the moonlight even though it is actually reflecting that red or blue light, not white light (i.e. all colors of light). That's because your eye recognizes the general pallete of the ambient light and makes an interpretation automatically about the colors of the objects you see.
That's happening in this picture too, either correctly interpreting it as black and blue in yellow light or incorrectly as white and gold in shade. But even knowing it's incorrect, changing your brain's interpretation is not easy.
My guess is that some people don't see the gestalt, they get stuck on the actual RGB color values, which float around light gray/blue, and a dark gold.
From what I read at the time, there's an intrinsic lighting judgement being made. It could be one dress being lit in natural light, or another lit under a florescent bar. They both would produce the same RGB values.
Interestingly nobody has been able to replicate the effect in another image. It's truly remarkable and one of the best things off of the internet.
Because your brain doesn't just straight up show you the raw color value sent by your eyes, it tries to estimate the true color of the object based on lighting and context cues.
If you look at a chess board with a gradient shade on it, you brain will tell you the squares are black and white, even tough they are really all completely different shades of grey to your eyes. Depending on the context, literally the same color can appear black or white to you.
All because your brain is trying to be a smartass.
For the first time ever I saw white and gold with this instance of the picture. It scrolled from the bottom of my phone screen and I was wondering what this white and gold picture was.... Then I saw it was the dress and I recreated the effect for myself a couple times because I was shocked that I'd finally made the dress look white and gold!
Most of the time it's obviously black and blue, I wonder if this version is doctored slightly, because I've literally never seen it as white and gold before today.
In real life, shadows often appear to be a different color than the area around them. For example, outdoors on a sunny day, shadows can appear to be tinted blue. The shadows appear blue because the bright yellow light from the sun is blocked from the shadow area, leaving only indirect light and blue light from other parts of the sky.
So basically, if the light source has a yellow color to it (which many often do), the shadows can appear blue.
One method to attempt to force the change is change the screen brightness and ambient light situation. If its bright where youre looking at, change to a dark room or vice versa
Is it a crime story or a story about the dress? I can't really tell. Like I think it's about domestic violence, but then I read another paragraph and then all I can see is about the dress, and then it changes back again.
The picture's exposure/brightness whatever has been so overadjusted that the black and blue looks white and gold.
You can tell me over and over that its "actually black and blue", and even show me the real dress beside it, but I cannot for the life of me shift my view on the original picture and somehow view the dress as black and blue.
Fun Fact: The same day, February 26, 2015, the Interwebz blew the fuck up about this goddamn dress, some Llamas escaped from captivity and we were all equally captivated by their chase for hours, it was an amazing 24 hours online
Edit: I did find a neat bug with DarkReader on though. It reads the white pixels as black with the magnifier on the right. Even turning off it's still pretty blue and white... Apparently it actually pulls the color judging by what your screen shows though... which is pretty neat all considering. The crosshair is on the large white empty space to the right of the large black stripe in the middle.
So I tried this and even https://colors.artyclick.com/color-name-finder/ but it will find only brown/gold and light blue/blue/white depends where you focus it on. This image itself contains no black pixels simple as it is.
See I get nothing but blue and gold... Which is the entire crux of the illusion lol. Your brain just makes up for the color shift due to previous images it's seen with washed out saturation due to ISO / artificial light boost.
Seems to me a color picker confirms white and gold. Although the white has a bluish tint, some areas don't even have that, and are light grey. There is no doubt the gold (black) is different tones between brown and yellow, which is the RGB you'd expect for a gold color.
I don't get the same at all. Can you send a screenshot? This was the easy hack to show the image is literally Blue and Gold/Brown. The rest is the entire point of the optical illusion.
Same here. When this was new I had 10 tabs open with articles about this dress, they were all white and gold. Then all of a sudden on the 11th tab I saw it as blue and black and thought it was a different picture. Went back through the other 10 tabs and they were all blue and black now.
I was able to see white and gold once more a few days later, but it was short lived and I haven't been able to see anything else but blue and black for years now.
I was convinced that half the internet was just lying back then, like one big global troll fest, especially since everyone I knew saw the same white and gold as I did. But just now my wife suddenly saw it as blue and black and she thinks I'm crazy, even though we both saw it as white and gold back in the day. So now I finally know that people were telling the truth.
Logically I realize the "white" is bluish-gray, especially if I stretch it out to the edges of my phone so I'm not influenced by the backlighting in the photo. But I held it up next to my black cat and the "black" isn't even close. At most it's brown, which is what gold looks like in shadow. Compare it to your background if you're on night mode, or your text if not. No black there.
Black garments aren't ever perfectly black, vanta black is as close as it gets, but depending on the lighting "black" materials will absolutely reflect some light. The dress is actually blue and black and the reason people see it differently is to do with how our brains try to colour correct for lighting conditions.
Craziest part is that it was used in a famous campaign for domestic abuse several years before the husband in the wedding got arrested for domestic abuse.
So about an hour ago I was showing this to my wife, we both saw white and gold and thought this is silly. But now somehow I am seeing blue and black and she is still seeing white and gold. Fuck me.
Iāve seen this both ways in the past but something cool is happening right now.
First I saw white and gold when this scrolled up into my feed.
Now that Iām in the thread (in a client that has Dark Mode), if I spend a few seconds reading comments and then scroll UP to the picture, it looks blue & black for a second and then that FADES into white and gold.
How blue and black can fade into white and gold I canāt explain but itās happening right in front of my eyes.
It always depends on the saturation of the image. When it's fucked up and darkened, it appears blue and black. When lightened, it shows the true white and gold.
I see tremendous sadness everywhere I look, overtaking the entirety of humankind and sending us into a spiral towards the vast, infinite void of the unknown; the final, peaceful reprieve we struggle to prevent.
Jk white and gold.
Edit: now blue and gold. I hate this picture sometimes.
So I can only see white and gold, but if I angle my phone away from me and look at the side, it turns black and blue. When I straighten it out again, back to white and gold.
I'm looking at the image on a very high quality OLED screen. On an OLED, it's very obviously NOT black. You can see the top of the dress in the light and it's not at all black. The black on my screen makes that incredibly obvious. Who cares what it is in real life, I'm not judging that, I'm judging the image and black is not a part of the dress, in this image.
The Guardian's image is black and blue. The image in this thread IS NOT. My eyes may look red in a photo, that doesn't mean they're really red. An image is not a perfect reflection of reality.
Actually, it's funny you say that since I am colorblind and have always seen it as black and blue. More to the point, the dress is actually black and blue.
It's funny that you say this with such strong conviction, because the dress was in fact black and blue, and due to the way the brain perceives color, it can be interpreted as white and gold. It has nothing to do with color blindness.
I looked at it an hour ago, and all I could see was white and gold. I picked up my phone now, and it's blue and black. Your brain is going to interpret it based on the context within which you've been in, and what the local lighting conditions are.
FWIW, as others have mentioned, the actual dress was, in fact, blue and black.
It's clearly white and gold to me. I showed my son and wife and they need to get their eyes checked because they both see blue and black. I could see my wife trolling me, my son too, but I asked him before I asked her, and he's too young to have seen this the last time it came around.