What Color Is This Dress?

About

What Color Is This Dress? refers to a Tumblr post in which viewers were asked to identify the color of a dress, which appeared to be either white and gold or black and blue. The question sparked an Internet-wide debate in late February 2015, launching the competing hashtags “#WhiteAndGold” and “#BlackAndBlue.”

Origin

On February 25th, 2015, Tumblr user swiked^[1] posted a photograph of a dress asking the science side of Tumblr to help identify its colors, noting that her friends were torn between it being white and gold or black and blue. Within 48 hours, the post gained over 400,000 notes.

Spread

On February 26th, 2015, BuzzFeed^[2] posted a poll asking readers to decide what color the dress really was. Within 10 hours the poll received more than 1.8 million votes, with 72% selecting “white and gold” (shown below).

Later that evening, BuzzFeed published a second post^[7] revealing that the dress was actually blue after finding it available for purchase on United Kingdom-based online retailer Roman Originals,^[8] which listed it as a “Royal-Blue Lace Detail Bodycon Dress” (shown below).

On February 27th, Redditor AskScienceModerator submitted a post about the dress to the /r/AskScience^[15] subreddit, where experts from a variety of fields offered explanations of the color perception phenomenon. In the first 12 hours, it gained over 2700 votes (84% upvoted), 3,600 comments and reached the front page of the social news site. Meanwhile, Redditor Sooprman posted an image of the Black and Blue Power Rangers to /r/Funny^[16] with the accompanying caption “The White Ranger / and Gold Ranger,” garnering upwards of 3,000 votes (86% upvoted) in the first five hours (shown below).

On the same day, XKCD webcomic author, Randall Munroe, used his Friday update to illustrate the differences that background lighting effects had on the perception of the dress’ color and included the following statement as the comic’s alt-text:

“This white-balance illusion hit so hard because it felt like someone had been playing through the Monty Hall scenario and opened their chosen door, only to find there was unexpectedly disagreement over whether the thing they’d revealed was a goat or a car.”^[21]

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the dress debate, including Gawker,^[3] Wired,^[4]CNBC,^[5] Business Insider,^[6] Mashable^[17] and Time.^[18] Several celebrities also commented on the dress on Twitter, including Taylor Swift,^[9] Melissa Joan Hart,^[10] Kim Kardashian,^[11] Anna Kendrick,^[12] Ellen DeGeneres^[13] and many more.^[14]

#TheDress

On Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, users chimed in on the color of the garment using the hashtag “#TheDress,” with the opposing sides using the accompanying hashtags “#WhiteAndGold” or “#BlackAndBlue.” Within 12 hours, #TheDress had reached over 400,000 tweets, and #WhiteAndGold lead with a ratio of 3:1 tweets over #BlackAndBlue. By the end of 24 hours, tweets containing #TheDress had jumped to over 1.2 million while the competing sides maintained a similar ratio.

Scientific Explanation

Many experts have cited the color constancy^[19] feature of the human color perception system, which attempts to make colors appear consistent under varying types of illumination, as being responsible for the different colors identified in the photograph.^[4]^[20] If the viewer assumes a white illuminant, the dress appears blue and black, but if a blue illuminant is assumed, the dress appears white and gold.