6 years ago today, this was.
And the dress is still white and gold, mfers. 
In that picture, the dress is clearly blue and brown. I can tell it’s not white because that blindingly bright space next to it? That’s white.
If you want to argue that the original dress was white before being backlit with a blue frontlight shining on it? Go for it. You want to argue that the camera has crappy chips in it that cause it to color-shift what it captures? Knock yourself out. But regardless, the color in the picture, #94a7cc, is not white. Not even close.
I think the picture is very overexposed, but that’s not all there is to it. The picture also lacks anything recognizable as a color standard. The other photo of the dress, being worn, with somebody standing next to the person, and flesh and lots of what we pretty quickly identify as white on that person, provides lots of references for us.
Our eyes are designed to figure out what colors objects tend to reflect better, and ignore what colors actually come off of the objects. The difference is, what color is the illumination? If we weren’t good at factoring out the color of illumination and ignoring it, then everything in incandescent lighting or firelight would be red, everything in fluorescent lighting or in shadow surrounded by sunlit grass would be green, and everything illuminated by natural clear sky northern light would be blue. That would really suck for a species that forages for fruit.
That picture is an extreme case of a pathologically misleading photograph, because of the clues it manages to avoid entirely (and perhaps because of overexposure and other limitations).
Yep, six years later and it still looks gold and white to me and I cannot get my brain to see it as anything but.
Yep, six years later and it still looks blue and black to me and I cannot get my brain to see it as anything but.
What’s fascinating to me is that I work with color correction almost every single day during wedding season. But how the dress looks doesn’t seem to really make all that much a difference whether you constantly work in color or not. (To me, it’s really more like a very light periwinkle and mustard, but closer to gold and white.) I reported six years ago that among the photographer cohort on Facebook discussing this, about 75% saw gold and white and 25% saw blue and black, and this is a group that skews female. But the 25% who saw it as blue and black were no better or worse color editors than the other group, so far as I could see. It’s just a weird phenomenon.
The true realization comes when you see that there is no dress. There never has been.
Yes, but what color WOULD the dress be, if it existed?
I think I finally understand the black/gold part. I now recall using a black pen on black construction paper as a little kid and marveling at how the ink didn’t look black on the paper, but either a dark gold or brown. Now that I’ve seen the dress be both black and blue and gold and white, I see that the black and gold are the same parts of the dress so it has to be a similar visual effect as the ink.
Man, 6 years sure flew by.
Back then, I was squarely in the white-and-gold camp. Now I’ve gradually come to see the dress as black and blue. However, I was being shown paler photos back then. Now the photos being shown around are the darker tone ones.
I think this is one of the most dramatic features of this illusion. Most things like this where there are two ways to see things, you can get your brain to flip to the other one - sometimes spontaneously, sometimes by covering up parts of the picture. But here it seems that everyone is just stuck permanently with one or the other.
Also, alternating with the blinding white in the background is a color that looks suspiciously like gold. The colors of the dress have absolutely nothing in common with those other two colors.
I don’t remember what I saw the first time this came around. But looking now at the picture just posted in post #321, I can see either black or gold. The background looks blue in either case; though if I try hard I can imagine a white dress in shade, while the white to either side is brightly lit.
See, the brightly lit parts on the right and left are yellow to yellowish white before it completely blows out as white (as verified by photoshop.) So my eye sets its white point with the light bluish part of the dress, and the darker parts of the dress are mustard. (And, objectively, they are a desaturated orange, according to Photoshop. Not gray, not black.) It seems my eyes see the literal colors, while the blue and black people see the (correct) corrected colors.
interestingly, my perception continues to shift. It can swap each time I come back to it and I’m now wondering if the ambient viewing conditions have anything to do with it.
As it stands now I’m in a darkened room with a small amount of natural light and the dress is blue and black.
I shall report back with further updates. Anyone care to give their perceptions and viewing condiitons?
The dress is in a box. It is either white and gold or blue and black. Until the box is opened, it can be thought of as both white and gold and blue and black. It is Schrödinger’s dress.
Meow.
So ridiculous that people are still arguing over this; the dress is:
BOTH ‘Laurel’ AND ‘Yanny’
Still white and gold for me.
Dunno if anyone linked to this in the original thread:
In that one, both the left and right look the same to me: as periwinkle and mustard (how I originally reported it, with “white” and “gold” being the closest to me.) There’s no “black” or even" gray" in either dress.
I agree that the darker color isn’t TRULY black, it’s more of a brown - but both the left and right dress look blue to me.