OK, we’re all over the dress.
It’s definitely gold and white.
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And that is precisely why it crowded ISIS and the Israeli prime minister off the Internet.
Color isn’t so much a property as a perception. It lives behind our eyes. And once our brains make the big decision, assigning, say, gold and white to a blue and black dress, they dig in, stubbornly insisting they’re right.
“I see the white and gold,” says Dr. Carl Bassi, associate professor and director of research at the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ College of Optometry. “A bluish white, but always white and gold.” He chuckles. “Once you have a perception, your brain works to make it seem constant, because we assume the real stimulus is not changing. We don’t want it to change. The dress highlighted how the same thing can be seen as different colors. People were convinced they saw what they saw—and they’re right, they did. Color depends on how the brain processes the stimulus.”
He breaks the puzzle into three Ps: physics, photography, and perception.
What is the physics of the situation? Certain wavelengths are being reflected off that object, and that’s the physical stimulus the brain’s trying to interpret.
How was the image photographed? When you take a picture with a lot of hues, you have a fairly accurate representation of the context—which means you know if you’re looking at daylight, at an overexposure, at an indoor shot in a dark room… In the original dress photo, the dress fills the frame, and what’s around it is ambiguous, so it’s hard for the brain to determine how the shot is lit.
Perception, then, ties the physics and the photography together. The physics of the dress’s reflected light made it possible for the brain to interpret it in one of two ways. If we saw the dress as existing in bright light with a shadow, we saw it as gold and white. If we saw bright light on the dress washing out its colors, our brain compensated and assumed it was darker.
What’s interesting at this point is that there are now multiple photographs of the dress online, color-corrected or dissected, and that makes it easier to fathom various interpretations. If I’d seen the New York Times version, for example, I might have said “light blue and black,” not wanting to judge the photographer too harshly for overexposing the image.
But what’s the deal with the people who correctly saw blue and black from the start? “It may be earlier experience; they may be picking up on different cues in the image,” Bassi says. Most of the time we agree about what color something is, because we have more cues in the surrounding context, and the lighting’s not so ambiguous.
What about the famous divide? The online Pantone color quiz, regularly used by wives to shame their husbands into letting them pick the paint swatches, notes that one in 12 men (and only one in 255 women) have some flaw in their color vision.
Bassi gives the statistic as “roughly 8 percent of males and much much less than 1 percent of women.”
There’s a tiny bit of controversial evidence that posits that some women may have four receptors for color instead of three, but it’s so scant Bassi’s reluctant to even discuss the possibility. The BBC wasn’t. The condition’s called tetrachromacy, and would allow such individuals to perceive colors invisible to the rest of us.
My private theory is that women are often conditioned (and sometimes predisposed) to care about fashion and home design, and we therefore train ourselves to pick up on the subtleties that make simpler minds cranky. Even with a mere three receptors, I got a perfect score (no surprise to my beleaguered husband) on the Pantone quiz. But though I can discern dark fuchsia from magenta and obsess on the difference between seamist and pale aqua, I’ve been known to wear navy tights with a black skirt—how can this be?
“We’re much more sensitive to certain areas of the spectrum than to others,” Bassi explains. “Down to very deep blue,” the shortest wavelengths, “and out to a very dark red,” the longest wavelengths, “we are not as good as we are in the middle of the spectrum.”
People may not have always “seen” the color blue, or at least labeled it that way, he adds. It’s been suggested that for a long time, humans had only two kinds of color receptors.
Which would have solved this problem neatly.
The dress isn’t the first example of ambiguous color, just a spontaneous example that occurred in real life. Check out these optical illusions.
