Let This Be An End To It

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The definitive answer to the Internet’s current most annoying meme by ASAP Science.

Now can everyone please leave it?

The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress (Wired)

Yes To The Dress (Medium)

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31 thoughts on “Let This Be An End To It”

    1. Grouse

      I don’t think it was ever supposed to by funny. People were confused by different perceptions and wanted an explanation. So I guess you’re right?

  2. Spaghetti Hoop

    I had friends who, up-till-now gave little heed to virals yet were still talking about this. Strikingly obvious that it’s an overexposed photograph – why waste your time?? WHY????

    2. Bort

      You’re uninformed as was I, the whole thing is that people can look at the same photo and see different colours, I see white and gold and my colleague sitting beside sees black and blue, the same photo, that’s what is interesting

  3. Mikeyfex

    OK the two comments from Lucy and Hoop have confused me now. Is it a prank? Was it supposed to be funny? What difference does it make that it’s an over exposed photo if people are still divided about what colours they see in the photo?
    Forget it’s a dress, ok it wouldn’t have gone viral – part of the reason it went viral was because people were giving out about everyone talking about an ugly dress – but it’s still interesting for the reasons explained in the video.

    (unless i still don’t understand that it’s all a joke.)
    I see white and gold in that image anyway.

  4. Spock's Last Breath

    People spend their time on stupid crap like this while important things happen all around them which ACTUALLY effect their lives. Politicians debate and pass contentious laws all the time but nobody pays attention. But the outcomes make a difference to people’s lives.

    People are stupid.

    2. Odis

      What’s stupid about trying to understand a phenomena, you can’t explain???
      So this sort of “stupid crap” is OK for scientists and philosophers, but the less intellectually gifted proles, should concern themselves with what YOU consider important, which happens to be current affairs, ACTUALLY?

      Righto m80.

    1. :O/

      Yes. I too wish to request the things shown in the above post. Also, isn’t this whole brouhaha no different to when a fella lets on to take his thumb off but it’s a trick and he’s only using his other thumb and sliding it along like that?

  7. Grouse

    The RGB colour chart doesn’t really help me because it looks like a blue-tinted photograph of a white and gold dress. So of course the RGB values would be towards blue (and I can see their blueness), but the dress still looks white and gold.

    (The video explains this nicely, but the RGB is a bit misleading.)

    1. Stewart Curry

      I think the idea of the RGB values is to show that, regardless of whether you see white and gold or blue and black, that’s what the colour values objectivly are – more blue than white and more black than gold.

      1. Grouse

        That’s fair. But if you’re seeing it as a blue-hued photo it doesn’t seem like it could lead to a perception change (or doesn’t in my case. And who’s to say the rest of the white-and-gold club are even seeing the blue hue?).

        1. Stewart Curry

          That’s what makes it interesting I suppose… for me, I’v seen it both ways, which is weird. The idea of the values is though, that no matter how you perceive the colours, they don’t actually change colour, they are a specific value which is measured by red, green, and blue values on screen. I think this whole thing is less about those illusions where you see either a duck or an old lady, and more like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion where the grey squares look different but are objectively the same.

          1. Odis

            That’s it, colours are defined by their co-ordinates.
            However there is the phenomena of metamerism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color) which relates to the shade a colour appears under a particular light source. e.g. North European sunlight, Mediterranean sunlight. And in most clothing stores a TL84 fluorescent light tube. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_illuminant)

            And there’s also the phenomena known as “conditioning”.
            You can observe this when you iron your clothes. The very dry part of your clothing might in some cases seem a considerably different colour to the part of your clothing that has absorbed the atmospheric humidity.

  10. The bringer of facts

    Strangely I always saw black and blue, then yesterday I saw it again and for about 5 seconds saw it as white and gold.

    I thought I was having a breakdown.

    Is that possible? To actually see both??

    I might have over internetted, I shall now have a lie down.

    1. Menace

      Yeah I’ve been consistently seeing it as both. Sometimes after watching TV it changes colour and ditto after I’ve woken up.

  11. Kevin

    The first few times I viewed that picture it looked like a wedding dress with gold trims. It didn’t look overexposed. It didn’t have a blue tint. It didn’t have a weird shading. It was a bright clear picture of a WHITE dress with GOLD trims. You know what that looks like, you can picture it. I would’ve bet my life and the lives of everyone close to me that it was white and gold and you were all taking the absolute piss – I know what I see. But then I saw the picture of a woman wearing it and the picture changed. It has remained black and blue ever since and I cannot for the life of me figure out how my eyes saw it as white and gold. So, for me, this whole thing has been bizarre and has had me wondering what else we’re divided on. I’m sure for those who’s only ever seen a black and blue dress this has all been bewildering but for those of us who see a white and gold dress, or who’ve seen both sides, it’s been baffling, fascinating and mind-bending. The brain is weird. What is reality, eh?

    1. dan

      Have seen it as white gold, blue tinted photo of white gold, and clear blue black. Very odd.

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