You remember the photo. It was 2015, and a grainy picture of a lace-trimmed bodycon dress nearly broke the internet. Then, a few years later, a pair of Vans sneakers did the exact same thing. Someone asks you, "what color are these shoes?" and suddenly you're screaming at your best friend because they see pink and white while you're staring at teal and grey. It feels like a prank. It feels like your eyes are literally broken. But they aren't.
Actually, the "pink or teal" shoe debate—much like "The Dress" before it—is a masterclass in how our brains take shortcuts to make sense of a messy, lit world.
The image in question featured a pair of Vans Old Skool sneakers. Under the harsh, greenish glow of what looked like a camera flash or poor indoor lighting, the world split into two camps. One group saw a turquoise shoe with grey laces. The other saw a pink shoe with white laces. Honestly, the intensity of these arguments was wild. People weren't just guessing; they were certain. If you saw teal, the pink-seers looked like they were lying to your face.
The Viral Moment: Pink or Teal?
The shoe in the photo belongs to a girl named Nicole Coulthard, who posted it in a Facebook group after her friend saw something totally different than she did. The reality? The shoe is pink and white. That’s the factual, out-of-the-box truth. But if you see it as grey and teal, you aren't wrong about what your brain is telling you. You're just a victim of something called color constancy.
Our brains don't just perceive light; they interpret it. When you look at an object, your brain tries to "subtract" the color of the light source to find the "true" color of the object. If your brain thinks the photo was taken in a warm, yellowish light, it will compensate by making the shoe look more blue or teal. If it thinks the lighting is cool or blue-toned, it shifts your perception toward pink.
Think about a white piece of paper. If you take that paper outside at sunset, it’s technically covered in orange light. Yet, you still see it as "white." Your brain is doing the math in the background. It says, "The light is orange, the paper is white, so I'll ignore the orange." With the shoe photo, the lighting is so ambiguous that the "math" goes haywire.
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Why Your Brain Disagrees With Your Eyes
Neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch has spent a lot of time looking into this. He found that our internal "clocks" might even play a role. People who are "larks"—early birds who spend more time in natural daylight (which has more blue wavelengths)—might interpret the ambiguous lighting in these photos differently than "night owls" who spend more time under artificial, warmer light.
It's about assumptions.
We don't realize we're making them. You don't look at a photo and consciously think, "I bet there’s a fluorescent bulb three feet away." Your visual cortex just does the work. It’s an evolutionary trick. If we couldn't stabilize colors, we wouldn't be able to recognize a poisonous berry in the shadows versus in the sun.
The Role of Chromatic Adaptation
When you stare at the shoe for a long time, the colors might even swap. This is because your photoreceptors get tired. If you've been looking at a lot of blue light on your phone screen before seeing the "what color are these shoes" post, your eyes might be "bleached" of certain sensitivities.
- Luminance vs. Chrominance: The brain prioritizes brightness patterns over specific color hues when information is scarce.
- Context Clues: In the shoe photo, there's a hand holding the sneaker. The skin tone of that hand is a huge clue. If your brain interprets the skin as being under a "warm" light, the shoe turns teal. If the skin looks "washed out" by a blue tint, the shoe turns pink.
- Prior Experience: If you own a pair of pink Vans, you are statistically more likely to see pink because your brain relies on memory to fill in the gaps.
The Science of the "Sneaker" vs. "The Dress"
While "The Dress" was about a blue and black garment (that many saw as white and gold), the shoe debate added a layer of digital distortion. The white balance on the original camera phone was likely set to "auto," which struggled with the high-contrast flash.
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Basically, the camera "lied" first, and then your brain tried to "un-lie" the image.
The controversy over what color are these shoes isn't just a meme. It has actually been used in psychological studies to map out how human perception varies across different demographics. It turns out that vision isn't a camera; it's a reconstructive process. We aren't seeing the world as it is. We are seeing a "best guess" version of the world.
Is it frustrating? Totally. It's the same reason some people love a paint color in the store but hate it once it's on their bedroom wall. Lighting is everything. Metamerism—the phenomenon where two colors match under one light source but not another—is the bane of interior designers and the secret sauce of viral optical illusions.
How to Test Your Own Perception
If you want to see the "other" color, you can actually trick your brain into it. It’s not easy, but it works. Try looking at the photo through a tiny hole made by your fist (isolating just a small patch of the fabric). By removing the context of the hand and the background, you stop your brain from trying to "correct" the lighting.
Often, when you isolate a pixel, the "grey" part of the shoe is actually a muddy green-grey, and the "white" laces are a distinct mint green. But when you look at the whole image, your brain "knows" laces are supposed to be white, so it forces you to see them that way—or it forces the shoe to be pink to make the mint laces make sense as "shadowed white."
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Real World Implications
This isn't just for internet points. Understanding how we perceive color affects:
- Digital Marketing: How a product looks on an iPhone vs. a Samsung.
- Forensics: Why two witnesses might describe a getaway car as two different colors.
- Safety: High-visibility gear is designed to bypass these "mistakes" our brains make in low light.
What to Do When You Can't Agree
The next time you're arguing about what color are these shoes, stop. You're both right, and you're both wrong. The physical reality of the shoe is pink and white. The digital reality of the photo is a mess of teal and grey pixels. Your brain is just choosing which reality to prioritize based on a lifetime of looking at the sky and lightbulbs.
Next Steps for the Curious:
To truly see how light manipulates your world, grab a colorful shirt and look at it under a yellow streetlamp, then under a white LED, then in the midday sun. You'll notice the "vibrancy" shifts. If you're still seeing the "wrong" color on the viral shoe, try turning your phone's "Night Shift" or "Blue Light Filter" on and off. Changing the literal light entering your eye can often "flip" the illusion instantly, proving that reality is much more subjective than we'd like to admit.
Check your screen's brightness. Often, turning the brightness to 100% will reveal the "pink" tones that are hidden in the shadows of a dim screen. It’s a quick way to win the argument—or at least understand why your friend thinks you're crazy.