By Sierra Hartman
If you’re reading this right now, it means your roommate and/or significant other didn’t murder you in your sleep last night for disagreeing on whether this goddamn dress is blue and black or it’s white and gold. Congratulations on having a healthy relationship. Before I get to the technicalities of what color the dress actually is, I’d like to address a couple points that came up a lot in yesterday’s maelstrom of confusion.
First, seeing the dress in a different color than someone else doesn’t necessarily mean you’re color blind. Color blindness is a specific condition that most commonly affects perceptions of red and green. Second, people aren’t insane for seeing different colors from one another. The people who say the dress is white and gold are flat wrong, but they’re not destined for life in a straight jacket. It’s a relatively easy mistake to make, given the circumstances, and whichever side of the line you’re entrenched on, you’re not alone. Even Taylor Swift and Mindy Kaling have stated their positions ,while Kim Kardashian’s butt sat in the corner wondering how a stupid dress broke the Internet way worse than it ever did.
So, now to the facts: The Dress of Ultimate Contention is black and blue, just like the imaginary face of everyone who disagreed with that reality last night. The reason so many people were 100% positive that the dress is white and gold is because there were no obvious color reference points in the photo. More accurately, there was nothing for your mind to white balance with. So WTF is white balance? It’s the way your brain makes sense of our Technicolor world. The sun emits light that, to human eyes, is perfectly white. It bounces off of objects that absorb or reflect certain wavelengths, allowing us to perceive color.
Your mind is constantly adjusting what it understands to be “white” by comparing and analyzing everything you see, every waking minute, totally subconsciously. This is why snow looks blue when you take your amber-tinted goggles off after a day on the slopes. This is also why most people aren’t bothered by having tungsten, halogen, and fluorescent light all in the same room. Digital cameras do the same thing only far less intelligently. The camera used to take the photo in question made its best guess as to what was white but it wound up stuck between two definitive solutions. It saw the blue dress and tried to compensate by adding yellow but it also saw the yellow light from the tungsten bulbs in the store and tried to add blue.
When you or your friend swore up and down that this dress was white and gold, that was your/their brain’s internal white balance making a decision based on what it saw. If the dress were actually illuminated by natural light, that may well have been the correct answer. As a photographer, I run into these issues a lot. I carry a reference called a gray card everywhere I go that I can use later on to correctly balance the light in any given situation. I’ve done this so many times that I can tell when a piece of gold cloth is actually supposed to be black, and a grayish/white piece of faux leather is actually blue.
So don’t beat yourself up about it if you still see white and gold. It’s just your brain’s poor decision making skills. If you still don’t believe me, here are seven other photos of the dress under normal lighting conditions. If you really can’t accept it and you feel like you’re taking crazy pills, just take a deep breath, watch some reruns of yesterday’s llama chase, and reminisce about a world before The Dress.
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