Viral Dress 2015 Trends Again; Is It Blue & Black or White & Gold? Color Perception Explained

In 2015, a photo of a dress became viral as it disrupted people's understanding of color when they seemed could not agree on its colors. They were either seeing a combination of blue and black or white and gold.

The internet was divided into two camps: #blackandblue and #whiteandgold. Both camps think that the other is wrong, but science has finally caught up after two years and determined that the differences in color perception are because of the eye system.

The Science Behind "The Dress" Illusion

According to the Eye Pic Eye Care website, the first thing to know to understand how people perceive the color of the dress differently is to understand that the photo was an optical illusion. Both camps are right because the colors are just how the brain interpreted them under different conditions.

It depends on which color the eyes perceive based on the light setting and how a person perceives color in context to their surrounding environment. That means that the color experience of each person could be different.

Some may only see what is in front of them, while others might be more affected by the context. For example, the eyes might be discounting the blue from the photo of the dress, which is why some people saw gold and white, but they could also be discounting gold leading others to see blue and black.

The explanation why eyes sometimes trick the brain is because the latter assumes light and how it illuminates the dress. A study, titled "Illumination assumptions account for individual differences in the perceptual interpretation of a profoundly ambiguous stimulus in the color domain: "The dress"" published in 2017 in the Journal of Vision, explains that people who see the gold and white dress assume that the dress is lighting by natural light.

On the other hand, those who see it as a blue and black dress assume that the dress is illuminated by artificial light. Pascal Wallisch, Ph.D. a neuroscientist from New York University wrote in Slate that shadows overrepresent blue light so people mentally subtract the blue light to view an image, which results in bright colors of gold and white. But the artificial light tends to be yellowish so some may see the dress as black and blue.

Color Perception

Color exists when there is a viewer, an object, and light, per an article in Cambridge in Colour. Pure white light is perceived as colorless even though it contains all colors in the visible spectrum. When it hits an object, it could block some colors and reflect others. But only reflected colors are perceived by the human eye.

The eye senses this spectrum because of the rod and cone cells inside them, which are responsible for vision. Rod cells are for low-light vision and can only sense the intensity of light, while con cells can discern color and function in bright light.

There are three types of cone cells in the eye and each is more sensitive to either short (S), medium (M), or long (L) wavelength light. Each type of cell does not just sense one color, instead, it has varying degrees of intensity across the wavelength.

Virtually, some combination of the three primary colors either by additive or subtractive process produces all visible colors. The additive process refers to creating color by adding light to a dark background, while the subtractive process uses pigment to selectively block white light. A proper understanding of these processes is the basis for understanding color reproduction.