What color is this dress?

74% of people taking a poll on Buzzfeed (308,000 people as of this writing) thinks this dress is white and gold.

To me it is clearly blue and black. Only 26% of people (109,000 people) share my opinion.

What explains this? Why do so many people see this as very different colors? What color do you see?

Blue and black/brown.

I get the blue part of it. It’s questionable to me whether it looks blue-ish because of the lighting (meaning it’s actually white), or because it truly is light blue.

I do NOT see where the interpretation of black comes from.

It changes when I scroll up and down. If I can only see the top half of the dress, it’s white, with gold trim. When I scroll so that the top half is hidden, and it’s only visible from the waist down, it’s blue with brown trim. If I can see the entire dress at the same time, it’s white and gold. I guess it’s a mind trick/lighting thing.

When I clicked the link and the picture first loaded, white and gold would have been an understandable thing to say, then it quickly became blue and black.

But when the image at first appeared differently, wouldn’t that indicate a pretty slow computer or something? And my computer is definitely no high-speed wonder.

How odd. Do I get to feel lucky to have seen both, or just strange? :confused:

Same here. But, it changes colors as I look at it, if I stare and I don’t blink.

I can’t see it as anything but blue and black.

Someone added this photo of a person wearing it, which looks even bluer.

To me, it’s blue and gold. The blue is an artifact of the lighting, so I can understand why people want to autocorrect it to white.

I don’t see black at all.

This is confusing. The linked photo is gold and white. But when someone posted what supposed to be the same picture on Twitter today, it was black and blue.

I see blue and brown. Not white(???) and gold nor blue and black. In what universe is the dress white?

This is weird because it looks so clearly gold and white to me that I assumed people saying otherwise was just the Internet being the Internet. This must be like that spinning dancer illusion.

White (maybe light blue) and dark gold. I can’t see any black whatsoever)

Edited: NOW I can tell! Scroll up and down, and it’ll change colors! Weird!

My wife asked me, I said white and dark mustard. Sooooooo.

Blue and black for me. The black is not dark black, more like black that has been washed many times. The blue is sort of a steel blue.

If you run an eyedropper tool over the dress, the lighter areas always come out with a higher blue component than either red or green.

I see it as white and gold.

If someone wanted to argue that the ‘white’ wasn’t really white, but rather a pale steel blue, I could accept that (though I don’t see it that way),but there is no way that I can see my ‘gold’ being the same as some people’s ‘black’.

Apparently,since roughly 1/4 of people see it that way, it’s not just a matter of “you people have no sense of color”…there’s obviously something going on here…but it’s weird.

I’m in this boat. It looks obviously white and gold, and I was assuming the “blue and black” thing was some kind of meta joke.

Bizarre.

WTF. I just asked my husband and he immediately said its blue and black.

This makes no sense to me. I feel like I’ve found a glitch in the universe.

OK, I hate you.

I opened that link, which shows a number of different versions of the same photograph, digitally manipulated to show how different levels of lighting make the colors appear differently. That’s fine; I understand that, and it doesn’t bother me in the least./ So after reading that page, I thought I’d bring up the original post (which I still had open in another browser tab) and put it side-by-side with the edited version to compare the two.

AND NOW I SEE THE ORIGINAL PICTURE AS BEING BLUE AND BLACK!!!

It’s the same web page I was looking at 5 minutes before. I didn’t close and reopen it; I didn’t refresh it. It was the same pixels, the same its of data, just sitting there on my computer screen waiting for me to look at them. And now THEY HAVE CHANGED COLOR.

I am NOT happy about this.

Now it’s white and gold again. :frowning:

Intellectually, I (kinda sorta, at least) understand what’s happening here…but that doesn’t make it any less disconcerting.

I think I need to go do something else now.