this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
545 points (92.0% liked)
Mildly Interesting
26979 readers
327 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Goddam! Thank you!
That kind of explains the gold or black dress!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
I can for the life of me only see it as white and gold, and I have really struggled trying to understand how others can see it as blue and black? I bet the picture you show here is a result of the research the picture of the dress initiated. It can't be a coincidence that the illusion you posted also is made with dresses.
It's such a strange thing. For most of the illusions I can trick my brain to perceive both variants. This one is clearly black and blue. I can see that the black parts isolated can appear golden in the light, but for the life of me I can't see it any other than blue. Brains are weird.
I wonder how much of this depended on the differences in device screens. In 2015 there was a lot more variability in display technology, lower resolutions in general and worse color fidelity. OLED was uncommon and expensive, you probably only had an IPS display if you worked in graphic arts, and a lot of people were still using standard LCD monitors backlit with fluorescent tubes, which meant that the black depth was limited and the detail in dark regions of an image was frequently not visible on the screen.
I remember showing a woman at work it, from my phone. She saw it as the opposite to me and another coworker. Me and the other coworker were stunned.
Just looked up the origonal dress pic on my pixel 8 pro. Its still white and gold to me. I've only ever seen it as black and blue (without aid) a handful of times since the day it went viral. In sure screens could influence this, but this damn thing stands as a powerful illusion on its own.
In the drawing, the surrounding background and the hard black lines on the lighter version are probably causing that we don't compensate the light in the same way in both drawings. We are not given the same picture like it happened with the original photo.
Yes and they are extremely flawed too.
The only reason we think we are smart, is that every other life-form we know of is even stupider.
To be fair, we’re the ones who makes the definition and therefore can make them fit our, in many cases, fragile ego. We’re only the most intelligent animal because our definition of intelligence is based on our self.
True, luckily many modern researchers are less biased. A lot of the bias is from religions, that claim that humans are special.
From modern research we now know that we are not special in many many aspects. Apart from being a bit more intelligent, we are clearly the same in more ways than we are different.
It's funny; I have a pretty extreme night light filter (i.e. blue is almost completely removed) and even through that it at best looks.. maybe gray and black?
Then when i turn the filter off it just becomes hilariously obviously blue. Like.. It's blue: you can tell by the way blue light is hitting the retina 🤯. At most i could stretch myself to consider it purple-ish, but that's just blue with some red mixed in..
But yeah i can theoretically understand thinking the black is golden, though even then it's just not quite right for me to ever see it. Like if the light was significantly exaggerated THEN i could probably force my brain into considering the black parts to genuinely be at least dark gold material.
The dress was revealed to be, in fact, blue and black.
Oh man, MAJOR missed opportunity there! They sold out of the blue and black ones like overnight, they should have fast-tracked a white and gold version production to hit the shelves ASAP and enjoyed the flood of purchases.
Yes that's kind of part of the link I gave.
But if you take a color picker, you can clearly see the RGB values from the image to match white and gold.
I did the color picker thing too, and its result was blue and orange. Not super helpful to this particular global controversy, but was worth a shot.
IMO the color of the actual physical dress is kinda moot: photographed (poorly), digitized, and presented to the world on billions of screens with completely different settings for things like color saturation, and the color of the thing that hits our eyes is not necessarily indicative of the color of the original.
The color of the dress in the photo was not the same as the color of the photographed dress.
It was white and gold! sprints away
😋
It was a whole thing in my lab when it went viral, and I wasn't on any social media at the time, so someone brought up the picture and asked me what colors I saw, and I said "blue and goldenrod, why?" I still see a light blue and a goldenrod, almost orange ib the fucked-up viral picture.
It was only after following elaborate instructions: change the brightness, squint, and cover up this section of the image, that I was finally able to see a white dress.
As stupid as it was, it was a pretty cool accidental worldwide psych experiment.
This is what finally helped me see black and blue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLxVZ8W-aHY
That has both interpretations, but it didn't help. I've never been able to see white and gold.
So, in the video, when you looked at this:
You saw a dark black and a navy blue? Or is it only in the context of the full image that you're seeing it as dark black and navy blue?
I see it as obviously black and blue, but i think the idea that anyone sees navy blue is a misconception and leads to much of the confusion. What i instinctively interpret it as is something closer to sky coloured, but clearly blue.
The black is a bit different because it's very clearly showing up as golden to the camera, but 1) it would be a very fucking ugly colour of lacing, 2) the photo is clearly taken in strongly coloured bright lighting so it's pretty obviously not the colour it looks like, and 3) it's a pretty safe assumption that any dark lacing is just pitch black.
This is basically what i intuitively interpret it as looking like in more normal lighting:
Correct interpretation: blue and black in an overexposed image
Misinterpretation: yellow and gold in an underexposed image.
The area of the picture that isn't the dress is washed out in white and the overexposure is even bleeding over top right corner.
Anyone misinterpreting must either be bad with visual context or not understand photography.
Because obviously it's impossible to take a photo with an underexposed foreground object and overexposed background.
My issue with this illustration vs "the dress" is that in the dress, the background is bright, not a darker blue.
In theory, this illustration just serves to show that nobody should be seeing "the dress" as white and gold. Thy do, and that breaks my brain, but I still feel that there is no logical way for that to be justified (and yes, I read all the research).
To my brain, it could only be white & gold (in reality I mean) if it was in drastic shadow. I iust imagine it not in drastic shadow and it looks blue & black.
I don't understand why people are arguing about a terrible picture. The colours are blown out. So you could misinterpret them as badly lit white and gold.
Were arguing. This happened about 10 years ago, so keep the quality and variance of computer monitors at the time in mind. That, and the average person doesn't know what color balance/contrast is. Plenty of people don't even realize that the same image can look different on two different monitors.
Perception is an element of intelligence, and a fundamental part of consciousness.
Huh, I checked the talk page out, turns out the guy behind the picture was jailed for trying to kill his wife.
I'll never understand how anyone can possibly see white and gold. You can literally see untinted yellow in the rest of the shop. If the dress was behind some heavy blue filter then how could the rest of the shop be such an overexposed yellow?
Because the image is gold and a shade of blue that you can get from white if your white balance is bad enough.
But if the white balance was that far off, then the rest of the store wouldn't be that shade of yellow
It's in a shop? It looks like massively blown out bright sunlight looking out through a doorway. I literally cannot comprehend the idea that anyone actually sees it as blue and black. And I've always been pretty good at being able to flip my brain to see either interpretation of other optical (and auditory) illusions.
Even if it was looking outside, sunlight is white. If the color temperature was so off that the sensor recorded white as blue, then sunlight would appear blue as well
Maybe this version with a minor correction to color temperature will help
tilt your phone until almost parallel to ground and look at it from eye level
I tried, it doesn't make the slightest difference. But thanks anyway.
this does it for me but I guess depends on the phone screen
when I clicker the link I saw it as black and blue for a split second but all I see now is golden and white 😭😭😭😭
I still don't get it