We are as one.
No, it’s your butt that makes your butt look big.
Your butt makes the dress look big.
Horizontal stripes ain’t slimming.
You see horizontal stripes? They look vertical to me! 
What is the color of the thread? Let’s talk about that.
What people have overlooked is there is no one in the dress. Most of the time people talk about a dress it’s more about what’s in the dress then the dress.
I’m afraid to ask, myself.
Well, the comment box is grey, the background white, and the header is purple, gold and crimson. Or does someone see that different too? 
(Looking at the “cool face” smiley, I’m guessing that’s the background color of the dress everyone who is claiming it’s blue.)
Hey guys, what color are these underpants? I see white with a brown stripe, but my wife said she sees kind of a dingy white with yellow blotches.
I don’t know about you, but I see a purple box with the words “Good Morning”.
Clearly, this dress is a pigment of your imagination.
I understand the OP perfectly. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting to find out about the very first time. But it’s not something that remains interesting after you’ve seen it. Unless it’s some sort of study showing why some people see it one way or the other, or why so many people can’t see it both ways, what’s the point? The mere fact that the image exists is no longer interesting.
(Or if someone could tell me how it looks black instead of gray or dark brown. Black, in the U.S. at least, is tinted slightly blue, not brown.)
That means there’s someone naked out there somewhere. Let’s have pictures!
(I refuse to leap to the sexist conclusion that it’s a woman. The dress may have been worn by a man.)
Yes. The current raging debate: whether or not this is a good thing. Some people see a huge, sexy ass in a blue dress; some others see a huge, very unsexy ass in a white dress. I choose not to look.
You have to admit, as ugly as it looked on the mannequin, it was *still *better looking than Kim Kardashian’s heinie.[sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup]FTR, I saw it as black and blue. I thought it was fascinating how many people saw it as white and gold, and how others were being driven crazy by how it switched back and forth on them. And I got to learn a lot about how our brains process color that I never knew before.
A typical Straight Dope thread, everyone wants to hem and ha.
I’m not furious over this (utterly baffled, yeah, but not furious…I’m a lot mellower now than when I first came here). However, I would appreciate an explanation of how completely random stuff blows up.
Of all the useless American Idol rejects who couldn’t carry a tune in a Nissan Titan, William Hung gets blasted for month after month after month after month, then goes on to release 5 albums.
Of all the cheesy amateur music videos on YouTube, Friday hits national news, gets torn apart like the goddam Star Wars Christmas Special, and makes a tidy windfall on ITunes.
Of all the weirdo Korean music videos, Gangnam Style turns into a full-blown pop culture phenomenon and makes its creator a multimillionare.
Of all the video games with hideously mangled English, Zero Wing sweeps the globe and gets immortalized on street signs.
Of all the frickin’ wastes of space to release a sex video on the Internet, Paris Hilton becomes a star.
Of all the has-been celebrities that had stupid unfunny crap written about them, Chuck Norris has his repeated over and over and over and over and over to the point where it revitalizes his career.
This, believe it or not, may have topped all that. Depending on your perspective, it’s either a really amateurishly taken shot or a nifty optical illusion. The former is dime-a-dozen on the Internet, being, y’know, the Internet and all, and the latter isn’t anything new…look up “checkerboard shadow illusion” if you’re interested. And it’s spread worldwide. In not exactly a slow news period.
I don’t really have anything else. Completely at a loss here.
Not even a little. It’s a genuinely interesting effect…and it will be dead in moments. It’s not even got the legs to be a nine days’ wonder. More like three.
I think your confusion stems from trying to equate this phenomenon with purposely crafted optical-illusion images, which are not particularly gripping because it’s recognized that they’re supposed to be confusing.
Everybody knows about optical-illusion images and how they’re deliberately designed to make you see things in a counterintuitive way, or get different visual impressions from the same image. Nobody cares about them except as a sort of recreational brainteaser.
The thing about #thedress was that it was (apparently) an ordinary bad photograph of an ordinary object, but different people perceived it in strikingly different ways. And for most people, the perception wasn’t transitory, as it often is in optical illusions: many people who saw white-and-gold simply couldn’t see blue-and-black, or vice versa. It’s very counterintuitive that two people with normal vision looking at the exact same image should see it in absolutely different ways, and what it says about color vision perception is really interesting.
Why things go viral in the media in general is a whole other question, but why #thedress was vastly more popular and newsworthy than a typical optical-illusion puzzle is very easy to understand if you think about it a bit.
If you’re old enough to remember the popular fever about the “Monty Hall problem” a couple of decades ago, you’ll see a lot of similarities. After all, there are lots of apparent mathematical paradoxes in the world, why should this one suddenly have caught everybody’s interest?
Well, again, the Monty Hall problem was an ambiguous result that unlike most paradox brainteasers was not designed to be ambiguous, so it didn’t trigger people’s usual “oh it’s some kind of trick” apathy. It seemed like a simple problem that had an obvious and simple answer—except that different people had different opinions about what that obvious simple answer was.
A baffling apparent anomaly about the nature of the real world, no matter how superficially trivial, is always going to get more widespread and eager attention than an obviously artificial puzzle designed to look like an anomaly. And when you think about it, isn’t that rather a nice aspect of human nature?