this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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It appears white/gold to me on it's own, I've never been able to see anything different.
Grabbing this specific image and sampling the colours though; they appear more of a grey/brown colour. I can sorta maybe understand blue, but definitely not black.
This is just using Polish photo editor on android:
This is exactly the thing.
Whatever the dress may be in reality, the photo of it that was circulated was either exposed or twiddled with such that the pixels it's made of are indeed slightly bluish grey trending towards white (i.e. above 50% grey) and tanish browny gold.
That is absolutely not up for debate. Those are the color values of those pixels, end of discussion.
Edit to add: This entire debacle is a fascinating case of people either failing to or refusing to separate the concept of a physical object versus its very inaccurate representation. The photograph of the object is not the object: ce n'est pas une robe.
The people going around in this thread and elsewhere putting people down and calling them "stupid" or whatever else only because they know that the physical dress itself is black and blue based on external information are studiously ignoring the fact that this is not what the photograph of it shows. That's because the photograph is extremely cooked and is not an accurate depiction. The debate only exists at all if one party or the other does not have the complete set of information, and at this point in history now that this stupid meme has been driven into the ground quite thoroughly I should hope that all of us do.
It's true that our brains can and will interpret false color data based on either context or surrounding contrast, and it's possible that somebody deliberately messed with the original image to amplify this effect in the first place. But the fact remains that arguing about what the dress is versus how it's been inaccurately depicted is stupid, and anyone still trying that at this late stage is probably doing so in bad faith.
The "white" pixels are literally blue. The "black" ones can be considered gold due to the lighting.
You missed the whole point. If I take a white dress and then shine a blue lamp on it, then take a photo.The pixels will be 100% blue, but would that mean the dress itself is blue?
But you can clearly see that the lighting is bright yellow-white, not blue...
The yellow background could be lit by another window or a different light source, so one could argue we don't have a good reference to tell. But the point is that the "picture of a thing" is not "the thing" itself, and there is always a possibility that they are different.
If I showed you a picture of a green surface, and asked you what color it is, would you say that it's white and that there's probably green light shining on it?
No, but it doesn't mean the other answer is invalid too. If there is no reference in the picture to tell what kind of light condition it was shot at, both answers could be possible.
So if we're just going by what's possible then the wall could be yellow and have a blue light, or it could be white with one yellow and one blue light.
Yes a very light blue, nobody is seeing brilliant white. But on a colour slider it’s much closer to white than the ‘true’ dark blue of the dress. If you sample the sleeve or whatever that is hanging over it’ll be even closer to pure white.
Earlier today I was sat in a dark room reading this thread, I looked at the picture above and it clearly had blue tones with warm dark grey. The dress was obviously blue/black.
I'm sitting outside in the light now, looking at the same picture on the same phone in the same app and now it's white and gold/brown.
Without going on my pc and colour picking it myself I can't tell what colour the picture really is since my eyes seem all to happy to lie to me about it.
Why not an American photo editor?
A) I'm not American
And
B) America can go fuck itself until it sorts out it's Nazi problem. I still think Canada should enact a full trade embargo and take our business elsewhere.
I mean... it was a dumb joke on Polish and Polish being homographs, but okay.
Woops
I missed that; bit of a sensitive topic atm...
Why are people downvoting someone for admitting they made a mistake? It takes some courage to do that.
I'm American. You have full permission to shit on us whenever you want. This place fucking sucks.
Next up: the dress worn by the woman on the right.
The point has never been about the actual pixel color codes. It's about how human perception doesn't follow those objective metrics.
Distilled down, we perceive color and brightness in comparison to the surrounding scene. The checker shadow illusion is a clear example of the same color looking different.
So the color perception on the dress depends on how the brain decides to color correct the white balance of the scene.
I find it easy to switch back and forth between the two color combinations: If I assume that the scene is in full sun, then the dress looks blue and black. If I assume that it's in the shade, but with a brightly-lit background, then it looks white and gold.
For the millionth time, the camera perceived it that way, not a human eye.
It's funny how people will keep barking about it even when you slap them in the face with color picker which is mathematical display of the color. There is no "how brain is seeing things". It's literally WHAT THE COLOR IS. To call white with faint blue tint "blue" and what is clearly a "gold" shade can't possibly be black. If photo was heavily manipulated through photo editing or lighting, that doesn't prove anything at all. Or the question was stupid. No one was really asking "what color is the dress", they were asking what colors are on the photo. And photo has no relation to the real dress because of light conditions manipulation or even photo editing.
This is the color picker in the image you replied to. Do you really think the colors on the left are white and the colors on the right are gold?
This is not my recollection of this at all. Everyone knows what physical colors are on the screen. If so people who see the image as white and gold wouldn't have been shocked/angry to learn the dress is actually blue and black.
You should watch https://youtu.be/bg41XfnIBvk for an explanation on how to properly get the colors from the image.