The Dress That Baffled Everyone: What Colors Do You See?

The controversial dress. What colors do you see?

This past weekend, the internet was in a frenzy. One simple dress managed to captivate users and spark discussion across all platforms. It began when a user posted a photo of a dress on social media and asked, "Please help me, is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? My friends and I are arguing and it's driving us crazy."

At that moment, chaos ensued. Some people saw the dress as white and gold, others saw it as blue and black, and there were even those who reported seeing other colors like purple, gray, and more. The online development reached comical heights, with people getting upset over how others could see different colors when the colors they saw were so clear to them.

It turns out that even celebrities around the world took part in the dress debate, sharing their opinions on the color of the dress on their fan pages.

So what's behind the dress's color mystery? We'll let you in on a secret, even if you see the dress as white, it is actually blue and black. Adobe, the company that produces editing software including Photoshop, took advantage of the debate to illustrate how their editing software differentiates colors, proving that it is indeed shades of blue.

The original photo quality, the type of screen we're viewing it on - and the way our brain interprets the colors - these are the reasons for the color discrepancies. According to experts on BuzzFeed, who dedicated a series of articles to this dress, our brain decides how to interpret the light reaching our eyes from the image, and which light reflections to prioritize. The differences can be related to our personality, our tendency to focus on certain details, our expectations of the world we observe, or the eye movements we have become accustomed to.

How different people see the dress

The famous dress, the full picture