this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
375 points (92.5% liked)
Mildly Interesting
26685 readers
735 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have no idea what must be wrong with someone's eyes to call that dress white and gold. I mean it was always a stretch, the shadow/lens on top of it would have to be fucking BLUE to color it something similar.
Even then it sounds stupid to go with that stretch of it being white and gold.
My working theory is that people who saw it gold and white were exposed to lead.
I struggle to see it as black and blue, the white and gold interpretation has been the one I've almost always seen
It's not a stretch by any means
Have you called your optometrist in the last 5 years?
I feel like this post illustrates pretty cleanly how someone would see that
The background is not blue in the original though?
People view the image in different conditions. There's so many factors involved. How bright your surroundings are, the make and size of your display device, how you perceive colors. Professionals perform color grading to avoid ambiguity like this in movies and such. Even your cultural expectations are hypothesized to change how you perceive the dress. (Eg. living in a desert environment can make you expect more yellow shading)
There's a similar illusion called the spinning dancer, where some people simply cannot see the image spinning one way or the other, while some can even switch between them. There's more information in the dress to make an objective assessment, but if that information isn't observed or obscured by the aforementioned reasons, it's totally understandable. That's what OP's image is showing.
Exactly lol. The rest of the scene had clear context that the image was overexposed and the white balance was too warm.
Anyone that understands photography instantly understood what was happening in that image. I've had people try to fight me and tell me I'm wrong about that, but I've been a professional photographer/videographer for over 15 years. Quickly identifying a technical issue with an image like that is like breathing to me. I do it every single time I take a picture, so over 10,000 a day on average. All I can say is trust me. that image was overexposed and too warm, You can tell by the way it is in the background, and if you can't see that then my words won't help you.
Shadows do generally overrepresent the color blue due to rayleigh scattering.
Brains are also very quick to make assumptions and also very rigid about keeping them. The spinning dancer illusion, even when you already know you can and have seen it spinning both ways, it can be difficult to switch percepts.
I get the illusion with the blue radiograph halfway down, but I've never been able to easily switch the dancer.
I was exposed to lead and yet I only saw blue and black.
There goes my theory! Damn! :)
I was able, very briefly and not since, to see white and gold. Otherwise, I thought they were all crazy.
Same! I wish I could flit between like I can with most illusions. I'm just happy I know I saw it the other way once at least.
It's a weird type of illusion because even knowing the truth I can only see the white and gold, even when the lighting in the photo is adjusted to correct the overexposure my brain still reads it as white.