The Dress

The dress refers to a 2015 internet phenomenon centered on a single photograph of a garment, in which viewers around the world disagreed fundamentally about what colors the dress actually was: some viewers perceived it as blue and black, while others perceived the very same photograph as showing a white and gold dress, a disagreement that grew from a private family dispute into a massive, globally shared cultural moment. The dress itself was, in physical reality, blue and black, but poor conditions in the original photograph, specifically overexposure and an ambiguous white balance, made it genuinely possible for different viewers' visual systems to interpret the image's colors in two very different, mutually exclusive ways. The photograph was taken by a woman named Cecilia Bleasdale of a dress she planned to wear to her daughter's wedding in Scotland, and disagreement broke out as soon as she shared the photo with family members. Scientists who investigated the phenomenon concluded that it revealed a genuine, previously underappreciated difference in how individual brains handle color constancy, the visual system's normal process of discounting the color of the ambient light illuminating a scene in order to judge an object's true surface color: viewers who unconsciously discounted the blue cast of the lighting in the photograph tended to see the dress as white and gold, while viewers who instead discounted the photograph's gold or yellow cast tended to see it as blue and black. Within about a week of the photograph first circulating, it had been mentioned in more than ten million posts on the social media platform then known as Twitter, the retailer that made the actual dress, Roman Originals, reported a surge in sales, and the company produced a special white and gold edition of the dress for a charity effort; the episode subsequently prompted genuine scientific investigation into individual differences in human color vision and perception.