Some of us can never see the dress as “white and gold” and here is (presumably) why

This image of a dress on Tumblr got pretty viral recently. Millions tweeted about it. Business insider, Wired, Mashable, Forbes, Time, National Post, BBC, Vox, the Guardian, the Independent, Today, New York Times, Buzzfeed, Glamour, Yahoo … every news media ever existed wrote about it. Your friends talked about it. The entire world got all hyped over this piece of garment, a traffic-generating piece of garment.

It was getting so much attention because many people managed to see the color of this blue and black dress in this photo as white and gold.

This is a great demonstration on the difference in how people perceive color. After all, colors don’t actually exist in the physical world. They only exist in our mind. They are nothing more than what we use to interpret the wavelength of incoming EM radiation entering our eyes.

So when you see that an apple is red, you are just receiving the EM radiation of about 650nm reflected by the apple. An object only reflects EM radiation it can’t absorb. In this sense, a red apple is not red.

To distinguish colors we give them names, though different people have slightly different ideas about what a certain color should be labelled.

For example, some people may refer to this color as orange, while some may say it is yellow.

(For the “Color Nazi” out there, you may incline to point out that it is neither yellow or orange — it is amber. And this is why nobody likes you.)

Now back to the main story about the dress Taylor Swift, the singer with a net worth of $200 million, was mind-fucked by in a Wednesday afternoon.

The dress is tearing us all apart.

Many people managed to see white and gold as their brain happened to interpret the colors that way (it may be that their visual cortex at that time was more well-adjusted to bright light and, as a consequence, tended to perceive things in a brighter color, and interpreted the lighting differently).

Out of curiosity, I tried various methods hoping to experience what it feels like seeing different colors.

But I failed. And so were many people.

We can’t see the colors as white and gold.

When I first saw the picture of the dress, I noticed more dark than yellow/gold, thus the instinctive interpretation that the stripes are black. Due to various reasons, some would perceive the stripes to be black too. And the stripes being black suggests the actual colors to be of higher saturation, confirming that the rest of the dress is indeed blue.

Some of us (who deal with web colors a lot) may be more drawn towards on-screen colors that are blue-dominated in terms of RGB. We would notice a huge region is blue, before our mind takes in account of the lighting and if the actual object should be of lower or higher saturation (Lower saturation would lead to seeing it white and gold). This perhaps also contributes in making it harder to get rid of the idea that they are blue later on.

We are more inclined to perceive the stripes as black may be because of our expectation about the color of its material, lace (which normally comes in black). And we rarely see dresses with gold stripes, or made of gold lace, let alone the combination of the two.

I would expect gold lace to be more tint than shade.

But perhaps one’s very thought that she or he can never see the dress as “white and gold” is the actual reason why she or he is unable to see the colors through the lens of others who perceive them differently.

You are the one who is limiting the way you perceive things.