Whats Up With the Fucking Dress Thats Blue and White
Media Platforms Design Team
OK look, I went to journalism school, and I understand one of the first rules of the business is that we must tell the truth. But I've also got to tell ~*MY*~ truth, so this is quite the ethical quandary but here we all are. The dress is blue and black, even though it's clearly white and gold.
Some context, if you went to sleep early last night and missed the Internet exploding: Scottish Tumblr user swiked shared the below image earlier this week, asking for help with identifying #TheDress's color palette: "is this dress white and gold, or blue and black?" she wrote. "Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the fuck out."
And seriously, it's white and gold. (But officially/"truthfully," it's blue and black.) The world at large took note, BuzzFeed made a poll, celebrities opined, #TheDress trended on Twitter, basically everyone "freaked the fuck out" just as much as swiked and her friends had. Making matters worse, there are now reports of people waking up and seeing the dress in different colors than they had the night before — even though once you're #TeamBlueBlack or #TeamWhiteGold, you cannot change. It's your very state of being, OK? That said, I'm ready to start a #TeamLightBlueGold, because upon repeat viewing of the image that's the fairest analysis.
Speaking of analyses, everyone and their vaguely scientific cousin had an explainer to hand. Some of them were just trippy and upsetting, like this Vine vid:
But others went more in-depth, trying to make sense of the dress even though I'm sorry IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. From Wired, some serious ocular science:
Light enters the eye through the lens — different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you're looking at. Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the "real" color of the object.
Furthering explaining their explainer,Wired spoke with Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. Conway explained why this particular image is so tricky, aside from just saying "SORCERY" over and over and then giving up, which has been most of our approaches, right? "What's happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis," he explained — the "daylight axis" presumably meaning the strong white camera flash in the background. "So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black," Conway continued. Experimenting with Photoshop color balances also clarifies this disparity, as this GIF via The Daily Mail illustrates:
Vice also spoke with a color researcher, the University of Washington's Jay Neitz, Ph.D. "This is one of the most fascinating color vision things I've seen in a long time," Neitz told Vice. He agreed that the photo's lighting is likely the source of the color disparity — but was not able to explain the disparity in people's opinions or, just as none of us can/ever will because it is simply the viral magic of BuzzFeed, why this is such a big deal. "Now I'm going to spend the rest of my life working on this," Neitz concluded, "I thought I was going to cure blindness, but now I guess I'll do this."
But OK, the dress is blue and black. Many sites spoke with swiked, the Tumblr user who started it all, last night — and she confirmed that she'd seen the dress IRL and it was blue and black. Additional photos sourced of the dress, and photographed, in less abrasive lighting also make that clear. Via BuzzFeed, for example:
Also, it's been found for sale online at British clothing chain Roman's website:
The dress is currently sold out in all color options, go figure. But Roman's creative director Ian Johnson told Mashable that more are being rushed through production — with one addition to the line. "We are thinking about making a gold and white version," Johnson said. "We already do it in other colours. We could do it quickly, but it has to go through quality assurance."
And this is great news, because after all, the damn thing is white and gold.
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Source: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/style-beauty/fashion/news/a37095/so-the-dress-really-is-blue-and-black/
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