this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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[–] [email protected] 160 points 5 days ago (8 children)

I'm still convinced this is the biggest troll. It's clearly white and gold

[–] [email protected] 94 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (13 children)

You can literally sample the rgb values and see it's blue and black

Edit: am I part of the joke here??? It's clearly blue and black...

[–] [email protected] 91 points 5 days ago (26 children)

am I part of the joke here??? It's clearly blue and black...

The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.

But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 days ago (4 children)

"The phenomenon revealed difference in human color perception..."

Yes, you're becoming a part of the joke. People LITERALLY see the dress differently. It doesn't matter what the objective facts are. TBH, it says a lot about humanity. Even when we have evidence that subjective experiences can vary, and even contradict each other, we still end up arguing over whose viewpoint is "correct".

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 5 days ago (19 children)

I've always really liked this explanation image you can find on Wikipedia page for it. Essentially, people who see white and gold are mistaking the lighting to be cold and blue-tinted, rather than warm and yellow-tinted.

The portions inside the boxes are the exact same colors, you can easily check this with a color picker.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Ah, so white and gold folks are, indeed, mistaken.

Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 122 points 5 days ago (13 children)

Because no one has posted the other photos:

And this is a photo of the same dress taken under proper lighting:

[–] [email protected] 77 points 5 days ago (15 children)

Not even the brighter version looks white and gold to me. It's so obviously blue and black, y'all are insane.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 days ago

I understand doubting the white but seeing black in that gold was what I could never buy. To me it seemed like light blue-grey with matte gold.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago

I'm the opposite, the OG photo reads white and gold no matter what edits I see. Even after seeing the dress in proper light the OG is still white and gold.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 days ago (9 children)

So people looking at this photograph actually can perceive this to be white and gold? thats utterly wild. And hard to believe.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I've been trying for the past minute and cannot see anything other than white and gold 🤷‍♂️

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

Back when this went viral, I only saw white and gold. Then one moment it just sorta morphed into blue and black. Now I can't turn it back to white and gold for the love of me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

It's very noisy. In the sense of there being a lot of pixels that would make up either colors. Your eyes and brain try to make sense of the noise and "decide" what color it is. The strongest correlation that seems to exist is the time people get up in the morning. Early risers seem to see white more often, night owls have a tendency for blue. It might be caused by the amount of daylight vs. artificial light that people see throughout their waking hours.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago

I can never see black and blue. I assume all those who claim to see black and blue are bots. fite me

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

I still only see white/gold even though the actual dress was black/blue

[–] [email protected] 76 points 5 days ago (19 children)

For your information : the dress is really blue and black, according to the store and manufacturer. The vast majority of people see it as white and gold, but I personally think most people are not used to decrypting overexposed pictures, hence their inability to perceive the right colors.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

not used to decrypting overexposed pictures

I used to see it black and blue, now I see it white and gold.

+ I do photography and often have to work with overexposed pictures

Edit: just looked at it again now its black and blue. Wtf brain

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 days ago

overexposure is not the issue but improper white balance, the camera was probably set for ~6800K but the lighting in the room was ~2700K

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (14 children)

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:

[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (35 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Why not an American photo editor?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I mean... it was a dumb joke on Polish and Polish being homographs, but okay.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Woops

I missed that; bit of a sensitive topic atm...

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 days ago (5 children)

I found this image to be a really good way to distill the issue down into the two different modes or perception:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#/media/File:Wikipe-tan_wearing_The_Dress_reduced.svg

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Ok is this post some sort of trick? I opened up lemmy, saw it white and gold for the first time in my life, then I took a shower, now it is blue and black once more.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago

10 YEARS AGO?!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago

I only see white gold

[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 days ago (12 children)
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 days ago (4 children)

I still don’t see either. It looks blue and gold to me

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago

Literally the entire planet remembers this. Even people who were not born yet.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago

When that was going around I saw it as black and blue, and my partner at the time saw it as white and gold. When it was revealed that it was actually the former, I made a comment something like "I guess the difference is I see things as they actually are", which got me a sharp look. :)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago

whats next? are you gonna post who remembers yanny/laurel? bitch be fr

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 days ago (25 children)

Never understood this one, or believed anyone who said they saw black/blue. You can zoom in and colour pick, the colours are measurable and objectively gold and blue-white.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, the gold and white dress. I remember some people were acting crazy saying it is blue and white.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (10 children)

I never really understood the debate. In reality, if you were standing in front of the dress it is black and blue. Now, if you take a digital photo of the dress and post it on the internet as a terribly compressed jpg, with weird white balancing, and brightness/contrast turned up and down it is gold and white. The debate isn't really about the reality of the color of the dress but the reality of a badly edited photo.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago (8 children)

Just asked my kids (Not around for the first time). One says blue and black/gray and the other said purple and green/gray. I've never known anyone who actually saw it as white and gold. Only heard that people do.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 days ago (4 children)

It's so fucking white and gold I think there's something wrong with you and your children

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I've only ever seen it as blue and black. I can't force it the other way like I could with Laurel and Yani. Y'all seeing white and gold astound me.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 days ago

Crazy talk. White and gold only

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I swear it was blue and black this morning, but now it's white and gold!

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