Why The Dress Looks Different Colors To Different People

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The Science Of Why This Dress Looks Different
Colors To Different People
The Dress White and Gold or Blue and Black
Royal-Blue
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The Internet is going crazy debating the colors
of this dress. According to three quarters of the
people in one poll (including the author), it is
gold and white. On the other hand, a solid
minority (including my boss, so I'd better be
careful) see it as black and blue. People have
even registered twitter handles such as
_at_thedressisblue and a compromise faction is
trying to push blue and gold. At IFLS, we've been
bombarded with requests for an explanation and
while we can't be definitive, it is a good chance
to learn a few things. While no single conclusive
data exists, multiple lines of weaker evidence
can add up to a strong case. Everything credible
we can find does favor black and blue. Adobe, who
might be expected to know, has endorsed Hope
Taylor's use of color analysis to conclude the
dress is black and blue, and Google image search
seems to agree. That certainly hasn't been enough
to convince everyone whose arguing that a tweak
of the color balance reveals white and gold.
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One can't trust stray photographs lying around
the Internet to be untouched (or of what they
claim), but there is no question the dress comes
in a black and blue version, while no one seems
to have found a similarly definitive white and
gold copy. There will probably be a lot of people
trying to claim they have orignated something
this big, but this interview with singer Caitlin
McNeill who apparently posted the first
photograph also supports the black and blue
version.
But why are we seeing it differently? First up,
let's rule out it being about the screen you're
looking at. Different people can look at the same
screen and swear they are seeing different
things. On the other hand, most people looking at
it on different devices may see subtle
differences (I see a little more blue/mauve on my
phone than on the desktop), but not the
drastically different perceptions the other
side are experiencing. It's also probably not
about your eyes. It's true people have differing
ratios of red to green cones. This can cause
subtle differences in how we perceive color,
particularly under faint lightfor example, stars
that for some people look red, look white with
maybe a pinkish hint to others. However, these
physical differences don't produce an effect
large enough to explain the dramatically
different perceptions here.
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Instead, it seems what we are experiencing is an
example of top-down processing, where we see what
our brain expects, such as in the case of this
optical illusion where the two colored squares
are actually identical.
Public domain. Both the colored circles and the
background squares on which they sit are
identically colored, but context fools us. But it
seems that the most popular explanationat least
on Reddit, but also agreed upon by the brilliant
ASAP Scienceis that this is an example of a
phenomenon known as color constancy. This ability
ensures that the perceived color of an object
remains constant, despite changes in the
illumination conditions. That means the context,
or surroundings, in which an object we are
looking at appears in, influences our perception
of its color. In the case of
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this dress, it is photographed so close up that
we dont actually know its surrounding
environment, so our brain starts to make
interpretations about the light falling on it. If
people envisage that its located in, say, a room
lit by blueish natural daylight, perhaps near a
window, they may see it as white and yellow
because our brain tries to remove the blue as a
possible shadow. Alternatively, some may picture
it under artificial lights, like those found in
shops, and so they see it as blue, which is
indeed the true color of the dress. Still, it's
not entirely clear what it is about the colors of
the dress and the lighting that cause it to hit a
sweet spot that divides the community so
drastically.