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Colour optical illusion
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
543 points (91.8% liked)
Mildly Interesting
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Yeah, don't worry, you're supposed to be able to see they're different.
The majority of the image being grey is gives your brain the right context required to perceive each half is being tinted, so the perceived white balance isn't shifted around like in the original "the dress" meme.
This is more of a teardown of the "original" illusion than a demonstration.
Looking at the bridge, it becomes clear that even though you can see in the wider context that the dresses are separate colours - when compared directly under skewed/tinted white balance they become indistinguishable.
Meaning that in the original "the dress" meme, how you perceived the dress' colour depended greatly on how you perceived the tint/white balance in the surrounding areas of the photo (or how it was displayed on your device).
I've seen the dress on multiple different types of screens and it has literally always looked blue and black.
Yeah i am with you. I never understood how anyone saw gold.
Sorry, I'm team gold. We're real! I've never seen blue in the original image.
So, when you say that you never understood how anyone saw gold are you
a) Seeing an extremely washed out image and compensating
or
b) You are literally seeing a solid black and a navy blue i.e. there's basically an insignificant amount of difference to your eye between the black part of the dress and #000000
If it's the former that might explain some of the difference in opinion, if it's the latter then I have no idea how I would manage to interpret it as black.
We're seeing (presuming other people who see it as black and blue aren't having some strange different experience, somehow) an image that is very very very very obviously taken in bright yellow/orange-tinted light, and just intuitively doing mental white balancing on it.
This is roughly what we interpret the dress as looking like under normal white lighting:
I could get my brain to see it differently by adjusting my phone's brightness and viewing angle, but it wasn't as voluntary as other illusions (like the Ben10 figure one)
I even messed with my phone's blue light level and still no change.
I have a hypothesis that the dress just shows that lots more people have some weird issues with color. Not necessarily outright color blindness but moreso just general processing issues. But what do I know I'm just some asshole with photosensitivity.
Same, i simply cannot find any other explanation for it. Apparently a significant amount of the population cannot do white-balancing in their head.
I have to assume they still experience the more physical white-balancing from light depleting the stuff in cone cells though: that thing where if you close one eye for a bit while looking at a sunny landscape, then open it and compare to the other eye by alternating which one you close; you'll see the world tinted.. i think it's blue-green-ish and red-ish depending on the eye. Different tint depending on the eye, at least.
The first couple times I saw the dress I saw it as white/gold. But after learning it was black/blue I stared at it and the colors seemed to shift in my brain. Now I can't see the white/gold for the life of me.
Adding a bit more context, the bridge doesn't just show they are indistinguishable, it shows they are the exact same color.
If you put a color picker on each dress, you'll get the exact same RGB value.