It started with a washed-out photo of a lace bodycon dress.
In February 2015, Cecilia Bleasdale took a picture of a dress she intended to wear to her daughter’s wedding. She sent it to her daughter, Grace Johnston, who then shared it with her fiancé. They didn't see the same thing. One saw blue and black. The other saw white and gold. This wasn't a joke. It wasn't a prank. It was the beginning of a digital wildfire that would eventually involve neuroscientists, celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift, and millions of confused people staring at their phone screens in disbelief.
The dress was real. It was a royal blue "Lace Bodycon Dress" from the British retailer Roman Originals. There was never a white and gold version for sale at the time. Yet, for about half the population, the black lace looked like shimmering gold and the blue fabric looked like a bright, creamy white.
Why? It wasn't about your eyes being "broken." It was about how your brain handles the sun.
The Science of Why You Saw a White Gold or Black Blue Dress
The phenomenon is called chromatic adaptation.
Your brain is constantly "Photoshopping" the world in real-time. If you walk into a room with warm, yellow lightbulbs, a white piece of paper still looks white to you, even though it's technically reflecting yellow light. Your brain "subtracts" the yellow. This is known as color constancy.
When it comes to the white gold or black blue dress, the image was overexposed and the lighting was ambiguous. The photo was taken in a way that provided very few clues about the light source. Was it a blue-tinted shadow indoors? Or was it bright, yellowish sunlight coming from a window?
Your brain had to make a split-second executive decision.
If your brain assumed the dress was in a shadow (which has a blue tint), it subtracted the blue and left you seeing white and gold. If your brain assumed the dress was under bright artificial light or direct yellow sun, it subtracted the warmth, leaving you with the "true" colors of blue and black.
Neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch, who famously studied this at NYU, found a fascinating correlation with sleep cycles. People who are "larks"—early risers who spend more time in natural daylight—were more likely to see white and gold. Their brains are conditioned to see the world under short-wavelength, blue-tinted daylight. "Owls," or night people who spend more time under artificial yellow light, were statistically more likely to see the dress as blue and black.
It’s basically a nature-versus-nurture argument played out in your visual cortex.
The Role of the Macular Pigment
There’s also a physical component. Inside your eye, you have something called the macula. It acts as a sort of natural pair of sunglasses, filtering out blue light.
People have different densities of this pigment.
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If you have a very dense macular pigment, your eye is naturally filtering more blue light before it even hits your brain. This can sway your perception. Age plays a role too. As we get older, our lenses tend to yellow, which subtly shifts how we perceive color intensity. But even two teenagers sitting in the same room can argue until they’re blue in the face—pun intended—because their brains are running two different "software patches" to interpret the lighting of that specific JPEG.
Why This Wasn't Just Another Meme
The dress was a watershed moment for vision science.
Before 2015, scientists knew about optical illusions, but they rarely saw something that split the population so cleanly down the middle. Usually, an illusion tricks everyone in the same way. The Ames Room or the Müller-Lyer lines (where one line looks longer than the other) work consistently on almost every human brain.
The dress was different. It was bistable.
It proved that "reality" is a construct. We aren't just cameras recording pixels. We are storytellers. When we look at an object, we aren't seeing the object; we are seeing our brain's best guess of what the object should look like based on the environment.
Wired Magazine reported that the dress image generated more than 38 million hits in just a few days. It remains one of the most-studied images in the history of psychology.
Real-World Evidence and The Retailer's Response
Roman Originals, the company behind the dress, woke up to a goldmine.
Ian Johnson, the creative manager at the time, confirmed that the dress was royal blue and black. They didn't even sell a white and gold version. However, after the meme exploded, they actually manufactured a one-off white and gold dress for a Charity Auction. It sold for roughly $2,000.
But for the rest of the world, the original blue and black dress became a lesson in humility. It reminded us that two people can look at the exact same set of facts—or the exact same pixels—and arrive at two completely different, "correct" conclusions.
Actionable Insights for the Next Viral Illusion
If you ever find yourself in another "Dress" situation, you can actually "force" your brain to switch views.
- Change the zoom. If you look at a tiny, cropped-out section of the fabric without the background, your brain loses the context of the lighting and often reverts to the "true" color.
- Adjust your screen tilt. Changing the viewing angle on an LCD screen shifts the contrast and brightness, which can trick your brain into re-evaluating the light source.
- Check your environment. If you’re in a dark room, your eyes are dilated and your brain is looking for light. Go outside or turn on a bright lamp, then look back at the image.
- Trust the RGB. If you really want the truth, use a color picker tool in any photo editor. The "white" parts of the dress are objectively light blue pixels, and the "gold" parts are objectively brownish-olive pixels.
The white gold or black blue dress wasn't a glitch in the internet. It was a glitch in us. Our brains are hardwired to prioritize context over raw data, a trait that helped our ancestors survive in the wild but makes for a very chaotic afternoon on Twitter. Next time you disagree with someone, just remember: they might literally be seeing a different world than you are.
Next Steps for Understanding Visual Perception
- Test your color sensitivity: Take an online Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue test to see how accurately your eyes distinguish between subtle color shifts.
- Audit your screen settings: Ensure "Night Shift" or "Blue Light Filter" is off when viewing color-sensitive photos, as these features artificially warm the image and force a "white and gold" interpretation.
- Explore "The Sneaker" or "The Strawberries": Look up more recent examples of "subtractive color" illusions to see if your brain consistently favors natural daylight or artificial light interpretation.