You remember the dress. That blue and black—or was it white and gold?—monstrosity that nearly tore the internet apart back in 2015. Well, a few years later, a sneaker decided to pick up the torch and cause just as much chaos. It’s a Vans Old Skool. Or at least, it looks like one. Some people swear they see a pink canvas shoe with white laces. Others? They are ready to fight anyone who says it isn’t grey with teal or mint green accents.
It’s weird.
The pink and white shoe illusion isn't just a low-quality photo failing to capture reality. It is a fundamental demonstration of how your brain "sees" light. If you’re seeing teal, your brain is making a specific set of assumptions about the lighting in the room where the photo was taken. If you see pink, your brain is doing something else entirely. Honestly, neither of you is "wrong," but the science behind why we disagree is wilder than the meme itself.
The Viral Moment That Started It All
This specific image first started gaining massive traction around 2017 and saw a huge resurgence in 2019. It wasn't a professional product shot. It was a poorly lit, slightly blurry snap of a hand holding up a sneaker. Because the lighting was so ambiguous, it created a vacuum.
Nature hates a vacuum, and so does the human visual cortex.
When your brain looks at an object, it doesn't just register the raw data hitting your retina. If it did, everything would change color every time you walked from a sunny park into a fluorescent-lit office. Instead, your brain uses a process called color constancy. It tries to discount the "noise" of the ambient light to figure out the "true" color of the object.
With the pink and white shoe illusion, the "noise" is the blueish tint of the photo. If your brain decides the blue tint is just "bad lighting," it subtracts that blue. Subtract blue from a greyish-teal, and you get pink. If your brain thinks the light in the room is actually white or yellowish, it keeps the colors as they appear on the screen: grey and teal.
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What Your Brain Is Actually Doing
Let's get into the weeds of neurology for a second. We have these things called photoreceptors—rods and cones. Cones handle color. But they don't work in isolation. They feed data to the primary visual cortex, which has to make a split-second judgment call.
Think about a white piece of paper. If you take that paper outside at sunset, the light hitting it is actually orange. If you take it into a dark room with a blue LED, the light hitting it is blue. Yet, you still "see" a white piece of paper. Your brain knows the light is orange, so it ignores the orange.
In the case of the pink and white shoe, the photo is "under-determined." There aren't enough visual cues—like a clear sunbeam or a recognizable lamp—for everyone’s brain to agree on what the light source is.
Pascal Wallisch, a research slash professor at NYU, has studied these phenomena extensively. He actually found that our "chronotypes"—whether we are morning larks or night owls—can influence how we see these illusions. If you spend more time in natural daylight (which has more blue light), your brain might be trained to subtract blue. If you spend your life under artificial, warmer light, your brain might react differently.
It’s basically your life history manifesting as a sneaker color.
The Myth of the Left Brain vs. Right Brain
You might have seen a caption going around social media claiming that if you see pink and white, you're "right-brained" and creative. If you see grey and green, you're "left-brained" and analytical.
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That is total nonsense.
The "left-brain vs. right-brain" personality theory has been debunked by neuroscientists for decades. Both hemispheres are deeply involved in visual processing. Seeing one color over another doesn't mean you're better at math or more "artistic." It just means your visual system made a different guess about the illumination.
Honestly, it's kind of annoying how these pseudo-science captions take over. They make it sound like a personality test when it's really just a glitch in our biological software.
Why This Specific Shoe?
Why doesn't this happen with every photo? It requires a "perfect storm" of factors:
- Ambiguous Lighting: The photo was likely taken with a phone camera that struggled with white balance.
- Color Proximity: The specific shades of pink and mint green are actually quite close to each other when you start messing with color temperature.
- Lack of Context: There are no other "anchor" colors in the frame. If there was a Coca-Cola can next to the shoe, we’d all know exactly what the lighting was like because we know what color a Coke can is supposed to be. Without that anchor, we're lost.
Becca Rodriguez, the person often credited with one of the early viral posts of the shoe, eventually confirmed the shoe is, in fact, pink and white. It’s a specific model of Vans. But knowing the "truth" doesn't change what your eyes see. That’s the most frustrating—and fascinating—part. You can know it's pink, but if your brain is convinced the light is blue-toned, you will keep seeing grey and teal.
How to Flip the Illusion
Can you actually change what you see? Sometimes. It’s hard to "unsee" your first impression, but you can try to trick your brain.
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Try squinting. Or, better yet, look at the photo while focusing on the very edge of your screen. Some people find that if they look at a brightly lit white screen for a minute and then look back at the shoe, the colors shift. This is because you’re "resetting" your white balance, much like a camera does.
Another trick is to look at a confirmed photo of the pink Vans in bright, natural sunlight. Once your brain has a strong "memory" of that shoe in that color, it might start to project that memory onto the viral, blurry version.
Actionable Insights for the Curious
If you're still debating this with friends or just want to understand the limits of your own perception, here is what you can actually do with this information:
- Test Your Environment: Look at the image in a dark room, then look at it outside. Does it change? Your ambient environment affects how your brain interprets the image's lighting.
- Check Your Screen Settings: If your phone has a "Night Shift" or blue-light filter active, it will absolutely skew the illusion. Turn it off to see the "raw" (and confusing) data.
- Acknowledge Subjective Reality: Use this as a lesson in empathy. If we can't even agree on the color of a sneaker because our brains are processing the same data differently, imagine how that applies to more complex things like memories or social interactions.
- Stop the Spread of Misinformation: Next time you see the "Left Brain/Right Brain" post, call it out. The science of color constancy is way more interesting than a fake personality quiz.
The pink and white shoe illusion isn't going anywhere because it taps into a fundamental truth: we don't see the world as it is; we see the world as our brain tells us it should be. It’s a messy, biological guess. And sometimes, that guess involves a mint-green sneaker that doesn't actually exist.
To really see the effect in action, find the highest-resolution version of the original image you can. Zoom in until you only see the "white" laces. You’ll notice they are undeniably a shade of seafoam green or teal in the actual pixels. The "pink" crowd is seeing the color their brain thinks should be there, while the "grey" crowd is seeing the pixels as they actually are on the screen. Both are valid ways of perceiving, but only one matches the physical object sitting in a box somewhere.