She’s a witch! I say we burn her!!!
Nope, try opening it in an editing app like PS or GIMP and compare with the eyedropper. Same 2 colours, all around.
Sorry, I think I got you confused with another poster here. Anyway, thanks for the explanations. I still think, however, that the color black is nowhere on that dress in the photo. Bronze, gold, burnt orange, pretty much all the same color. Black, not so much.
Unless you are using a known target, like an X-Rite color chart and color calibrating to that, or dealing with a photographer who knows how to accurately color balance, this is probably a good thing. (Plus you need to have the monitor you are looking at color calibrated, and you have to make sure there is no weirdness going on with color spaces, which is a bit more of an advanced topic.) I would never trust a cell phone or point and shoot camera from a random user to give me accurate enough information to make a color judgment. Besides, anything where color matching is important, like decor and the like, I would need to see the item in person to accurately gauge it.
I agree. Even in the darkest photos on the Wired article, I still see dark brown, and not black, and Photoshop confirms.
I’m still trying to understand how people see it as white and gold. Even turning my laptop screen up, it still looks like a (washed out) dark blue and black. Squinting at the lightest picture in that article, if that’s gold trim, it’s the ugliest gold I’ve ever seen - it looks like the River Ankh or something.
And to everyone who thinks the black and blue people are trolling, it’s the actual color of the dress. (The reviews on it are great).
If Iran or North Korea gets in on the debate, this could spark off WWIII . . . 
Yeah, people are adamant.
If this were a marketing stunt, it hit it out of the ballpark.
It’s possible that the vactual dress has those colors, and it’s possible the camera has a weird rersponse, and peo0ple’s expectations are what they are. But the real issue here is what colors appear to be present in that photograph. I don’t know exactly why, since I don’t know the history of the recording and preserving of that image, but there is no way that the light blue that appears in the controversial photograph is the same as the deep royal blue in the Amazon ad. And there’s no way that the decorative bands on the dress in the photograph that srted this look like the undoubted black in the amazon ad.
If you put that ad in front of people and asked them the colors, I have no doubt that people would respond “blue and black” (excedpt for the jokers who would say “white and gold” just to mess with you).
but the colors of the original dress don’t really help in talking about the colors in the photograph. I could photograph that dress under red light and it’d all look black.
Here’s a photo that may help you understand the white and gold camp. Basically, under different lighting conditions with more surrounding references as influence the dress will look like it’s originally white/gold but appearing under shadow (tinting it blue). (compare the shadow of the white llama to the “shadowed” dress). Thing is, there’s no contour shading on the dress picture as it’s flat, and barely any other reference, so people are going one way or the other by gut instinct. I couldn’t even tell the colors were so overexposed so I assumed that what I saw is what it is.
What I find a little odd is that people can’t “see” the literal colors of what’s in the photograph and without even thinking about it their brain is trying to aim for “but what color is this dress really, assuming different lighting conditions?”.
“As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn’t a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!”
-Jack Handy
Similarly, those of us who see periwinkle and mustard/bronze or white and gold can’t understand how the “black” part of the dress can be interpreted as black or a neutral gray. It’s not even close to that color in the photograph, and it’s especially evident if you see it in isolation. Seriously, no matter how hard I try I can’t see that as black. The “white” part definitely looks blue–there’s no question about that for me. But how can the color in the top left be characterized as “black”?
Color perception is a funny thing. Like I said before, all three answers are “correct,” depending on what your brain is doing. And there are reports of the colors switching for many people. Reminds me a little of that young lady/old woman optical illusion, or of the spinning human figure optical illusions (where some see it spinning clockwise, others counter, and for many, it depends on when they look at it) except with colors. It’s not exactly the same thing, of course, but it’s similar in the sense that two people could be looking at exactly the same spinning figure, with one swearing it’s going clockwise, and the other counter-clockwise.
After doing research, yes, it’s a black and blue dress.
That being said, it looked 100% white and gold to me at first glance.
And, apparently, I still got the coding wrong, despite the edit. Let’s try again. I swear, I’m not usually this much of an idiot.
Frequency is inverse of wavelength, so that blue has the highest frequency (more waves per unit of time or distance) and red is lower. Is that what you’re thinking of?
I’m blocked from that site at work. I’ll try tonight.
I see dark gold and light, dim blue. Seriously, how can you see anything else?
Look at this! How are you not seeing this?
This prank the whole internet is playing on me has gone long enough. You can all stop now.
To me there are a few interesting things about this:
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That several people could stand around the same monitor and report different colors.
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That I could say it was white and gold, scroll down to read comments, then scroll back up and have the dress be blue and black.
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If you look at the image and see it as white and gold and then squint your eyes, it will turn blue and black.
Hey, you’re the color of magic, you’ve got an unfair advantage in this discussion! 
The black isn’t because of the flat color, though, it’s because of the gradient. I took a bunch of random samples from the black parts of the dress:
All the colors are clearly on a gradient from a washed out yellow to a deep brown, but since the whole room is washed out it’s obvious (to me) that it’s a washed out black.
Hell, there’s a curtain in the background of the photo most people agree has black cow-like spots, and the browns in that curtain are almost the same as the dress.