this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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It appears white/gold to me on it's own, I've never been able to see anything different.
Grabbing this specific image and sampling the colours though; they appear more of a grey/brown colour. I can sorta maybe understand blue, but definitely not black.
This is just using Polish photo editor on android:
This is exactly the thing.
Whatever the dress may be in reality, the photo of it that was circulated was either exposed or twiddled with such that the pixels it's made of are indeed slightly bluish grey trending towards white (i.e. above 50% grey) and tanish browny gold.
That is absolutely not up for debate. Those are the color values of those pixels, end of discussion.
Edit to add: This entire debacle is a fascinating case of people either failing to or refusing to separate the concept of a physical object versus its very inaccurate representation. The photograph of the object is not the object: ce n'est pas une robe.
The people going around in this thread and elsewhere putting people down and calling them "stupid" or whatever else only because they know that the physical dress itself is black and blue based on external information are studiously ignoring the fact that this is not what the photograph of it shows. That's because the photograph is extremely cooked and is not an accurate depiction. The debate only exists at all if one party or the other does not have the complete set of information, and at this point in history now that this stupid meme has been driven into the ground quite thoroughly I should hope that all of us do.
It's true that our brains can and will interpret false color data based on either context or surrounding contrast, and it's possible that somebody deliberately messed with the original image to amplify this effect in the first place. But the fact remains that arguing about what the dress is versus how it's been inaccurately depicted is stupid, and anyone still trying that at this late stage is probably doing so in bad faith.
The "white" pixels are literally blue. The "black" ones can be considered gold due to the lighting.
You missed the whole point. If I take a white dress and then shine a blue lamp on it, then take a photo.The pixels will be 100% blue, but would that mean the dress itself is blue?
But you can clearly see that the lighting is bright yellow-white, not blue...
The yellow background could be lit by another window or a different light source, so one could argue we don't have a good reference to tell. But the point is that the "picture of a thing" is not "the thing" itself, and there is always a possibility that they are different.
If I showed you a picture of a green surface, and asked you what color it is, would you say that it's white and that there's probably green light shining on it?
No, but it doesn't mean the other answer is invalid too. If there is no reference in the picture to tell what kind of light condition it was shot at, both answers could be possible.
So if we're just going by what's possible then the wall could be yellow and have a blue light, or it could be white with one yellow and one blue light.
That's... literally not what this phenominon is about, either. Talk about missing the point.
That is literally what the argument is caused by, adaptive perception to lighting conditions.
That's less than half of the related concepts.
It's exactly the point. White fabric will appear blue in blue light, which is why some people see this white dress and think it's blue.