Why did people disagree about the dress?

February 26, 2025 1:29 PM

A decade after the dress, we’ve learned a lot about how people could see a simple image so differently from one another. The dress is of particular interest to me as a researcher who studies differences in perception and cognition between individuals. While the colors of a piece of clothing might be a trivial thing to disagree about, we can all learn a thing or two from the dress about how to navigate high-stakes disagreements. from It’s Been 10 Years Since “The Dress” [Slate, ungated]
posted by chavenet (63 comments total)

I thought this was going to be about the Diana Spencer “revenge” dress.
posted by Lemkin at 1:34 PM on February 26 [3 favorites]

I still remember the weekend that story went viral and even at the time we knew it was weird and frivolous; and yet it was a lovely moment in time when some lighthearted randomness united us as a people. Like they say, it’s not often we all talk about the same thing at the same time.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:37 PM on February 26 [15 favorites]

10 years!??? Maybe the pandemic broke my brain, because that feels like two... maybe three years ago.
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 1:44 PM on February 26 [19 favorites]

A decade after the dress...

uff.
posted by bigendian at 1:47 PM on February 26 [8 favorites]

It’s all in the lighting. Given the exposure of the image, it’s unclear to the viewer whether the photo was taken indoors (under artificial light) or outdoors (under natural light).

Exactly - it could be interpreted as either an under-exposed image of a white and gold dress in (blue-ish) shade, or a very over-exposed image of a blue and black dress. Which is what level-headed people (including me) said in the first place. Not that anybody listened.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:33 PM on February 26 [7 favorites]

It was only today that I finally was able to shift my perception to perceive it as blue and black. Back when this first made the rounds, I was not able to budge my brain away from white and gold.
posted by notoriety public at 2:40 PM on February 26 [3 favorites]

The Dress Debate was always a "tell me you don't understand white balance without telling me you don't understand white balance" moment. I found the explainer pieces that followed it for a few years kind of annoying.

I think it was just something that was harder for people to flip in their heads once they'd landed on a visual interpretation that worked for them. You can show a lot of optical illusions and say "Aha, but is it a duck or a rabbit?" and people will say "Oh yeah! Now I can see how it could be either!" But this was something that locked in pretty hard, and if you weren't used to thinking about white balance you really had a hard time doing that with The Dress.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:41 PM on February 26 [10 favorites]

The blown-out background ruled out any underexposure. But people aren't good at assessing that kind of information.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:42 PM on February 26 [3 favorites]

at the time we knew it was weird and frivolous; and yet it was a lovely moment in time when some lighthearted randomness united us as a people.

Oh no, this is one of the few things, like toilet paper hanging direction, that engenders fully-justified tribal genocide.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:44 PM on February 26 [5 favorites]

I believe there was also a semantic split between people who understood the question to be, “what are the colors depicted in this image” (white and gold) and “what colors do you suppose the subject of this image is in real life” (blue and black).
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 3:03 PM on February 26 [9 favorites]

That means it's also been 10 years since llamas were on the loose in Arizona. Man that was a fun day on the internet.
posted by msbutah at 3:06 PM on February 26 [3 favorites]

I used the dress as an example of white balance and the importance of context when analyzing images in my introduction to color management seminar.
posted by tedious at 3:07 PM on February 26 [7 favorites]

It was only today that I finally was able to shift my perception to perceive it as blue and black

I hadn't seen that picture for ten years and now I'm like holy sh*t, the colors flip-flopped sometime in the last ten years
posted by daisystomper at 3:12 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

like toilet paper hanging direction

Under?

Or Over?
posted by ginger.beef at 3:15 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

IKEA monkey was about 13 years ago
posted by achrise at 3:15 PM on February 26 [5 favorites]

Lemkin, heh, "a decade after the ['Diana Spencer revenge'] dress" has been able to drink legally in the UK for three years now.

As for The Dress, it mostly served as an amusing reminder in the Kouti household over how much we disagree on what constitutes green vs. blue and what amount of that is culturally stipulated vs. cognophysically perceived (neither of us are on the colorblind spectrum).
posted by Pandora Kouti at 3:16 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

The blown-out background ruled out any underexposure. But people aren't good at assessing that kind of information.

Yeah I never was able to see gold/white and my best guess now is that it’s bc I read the image so clearly as overexposed, or properly exposed but then blown out in post. The tone of the black and the artifacts in the dark areas are the tell and I don’t think my brain could be convinced otherwise.
posted by wemayfreeze at 3:19 PM on February 26 [4 favorites]

Also,

What the hell happened to America while I was asleep?
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 0:09 on February 27, 2015 [4 favorites +] [⚑]

got way too relevant. Can we go back to escapee llamas and arguing for science, please?
posted by Pandora Kouti at 3:21 PM on February 26 [4 favorites]

“what are the colors depicted in this image” (white and gold)

Literally pale-grayish-blue and brownish-bronze (say, Pantone 535 and 455). "White and gold" is an interpretation.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:28 PM on February 26 [6 favorites]

> sober explainations about lighting

but...! the...! *does confused Jackie Chan hands* it was sent in the context of clothes shopping! there's a clothes rack in the back, everything is blown out tae fuck! *walks off ranting* what outdoors situation looks like this, a yard sale on the Sun?! aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
posted by lucidium at 3:44 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

Chromomancy!
posted by clavdivs at 3:47 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

The dress made me unbelievably happy, as an event. It STILL makes me happy (as does Ecce Homo, but that's beside) because now I could point to a tangible example of BRAIN DIVERSITY. All my life up to that moment it had been fully impossible to even be believed when I was simply perceiving something differently.
posted by droomoord at 3:49 PM on February 26 [5 favorites]

nobody can be smug quite like photographers can lmao
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:53 PM on February 26 [9 favorites]

*ahem* I appreciate the larger point the article tries to draw about disagreements in general, and it strikes pretty true. The thing is, there is a factual reality, and it's utterly maddening that we have to do this "taking steps toward a real dialogue about people's different priors" process for things that are way way more important than the colour of a dress.
posted by lucidium at 3:57 PM on February 26 [3 favorites]

I have two friends, incidentally both now doctors, that saw the dress in white and gold. They had always been credible to me, so I believed them. I knew they were wrong and proved it later, but they "knew" I was wrong, too, and that is an important frame for compassionately dealing with people coming honestly by an incorrect perspective.
posted by droomoord at 4:08 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

Has anyone found the original photographer (or even looked for them)? Whoever took that photograph could have stopped all the madness in its tracks. But they chose not to.

Who's the real monster here?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 4:24 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

One day--perhaps at the twenty-year anniversary--I will finally be able to see it as black and blue.
posted by mittens at 4:29 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

I always saw it as #625648 and #8697bc, but maybe that's just me.
posted by signal at 4:52 PM on February 26 [5 favorites]

I was reading too much SCP content at the time and did wonder if it was some sort of memetic image that had broken out. I avoided exposure for the first day, just to be on the safe side.
posted by Paid In Full at 4:53 PM on February 26 [6 favorites]

nobody can be smug quite like photographers can lmao

Never have truer words been spoken.

And I'm a photographer, who spent the better part of this afternoon color correcting a magazine shoot, and I still can't see it as black and blue.
posted by msbrauer at 5:09 PM on February 26 [4 favorites]

The various perceptions of the dress aren't too surprising, our eyes and brains are constantly lying to us, as seen in these optical illusions. No wonder we're all in therapy (or at least should be).
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:16 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

Obligatory Captain Disillusion video about the dress
posted by Aleyn at 5:48 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

blue and bronze. then and now.
posted by Clowder of bats at 6:00 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

Still periwinkle and yellowish-brown to me!
posted by tavella at 6:02 PM on February 26 [3 favorites]

I was delighted when this showed up because at first I couldn't see it as anything but white and gold, but then after about 15 minutes I swear it felt like my brain experienced a real-life rack focus shot and it transformed right in front of me to blue and black/bronze. It was disappointing when I couldn't get my brain to do it again, because that was an extremely weird feeling and I really want it to happen once more.

Unfortunately all these years later the colors stubbornly remain dark.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 6:34 PM on February 26 [5 favorites]

Computer display color management is such a difficult thing — if you need reliably consistent color rendition, your main options are basically "the sort of monitor, made by a company like Eizo, that costs amounts that even Gaming Rig people would find unthinkable," then a decent bit of consistency below that "displays sold by Apple," and then a huge amount below that is "literally all other consumer displays." Like, yeah, people are going to see the dress as being different colors when their displays literally do not display the same colors as their friends' phones and computers.

Incidentally, human color perception is also deeply flawed and unreliable! If you've ever found yourself thinking that veins in skin look "blue," try taking a photo and using the eye dropper tool! You'll likely find that the actual RGB values are very neutral gray, but because of the surrounding skin tones, neutral gray looks "blue."
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:53 PM on February 26 [4 favorites]

if you need reliably consistent color rendition, your main options are basically "the sort of monitor, made by a company like Eizo, that costs amounts that even Gaming Rig people would find unthinkable," then a decent bit of consistency below that "displays sold by Apple," and then a huge amount below that is "literally all other consumer displays."

For "I can hear a difference in $2000 audio cables" values of "you"....
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:33 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

I believe there was also a semantic split between people who understood the question to be, “what are the colors depicted in this image” (white and gold) and “what colors do you suppose the subject of this image is in real life” (blue and black)

I think that is part of it!

Put this way, it reminds me of the aphantasia discussions around "what do you mean by seeing with the mind's eye?" The language is casual, conversational, and vague

(The dress is BLUE AND GOLD btw but I must have really skewed color perceptions because it seems like I'm the only person who ever says this. Carry on, don't mind me)
posted by treepour at 7:52 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

Is this something you need a [Achromatopsia] to understand?


nobody can be smug quite like photographers can lmao

coughs in architect
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:41 PM on February 26 [4 favorites]

I remember this one being way way way more tolerable to discuss with students in class than "is water wet?" which then, now and forever was just insufferable pseudo intellectual wanking to me.

Also, I have been teaching for 10 years!!

(Even knowing it is in reality blue and black I can still only see white and gold.)
posted by subdee at 9:06 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

Tangentially related does anyone remember a series of tweets or toots (I think) that laid out a series of ways our eyes and brain conspire to lie to us about what we are seeing. The one I remember was the first second after you look at a ticking clock is longer than normal because your brain back fills your vision to make up for a lack of input when your eyes are moving. Could have been by foone maybe.
posted by Mitheral at 9:07 PM on February 26 [3 favorites]

For "I can hear a difference in $2000 audio cables" values of "you"....
posted by Greg_Ace

the ever-present temptation to go in on MetaFilter Snark™ aside, I can absolutely assure you that there are industries where it is absolutely vital to be able to know, with confidence, that the colors I am seeing on my monitor today are exactly the same as the colors you are seeing on your monitor next week, and among the common consumer brands, Apple is by far the only company that even sort of cares about consistency in color rendition — I've seen Dell monitors of the same model number placed side by side that were displaying visibly different coloration.
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:28 PM on February 26 [5 favorites]

Clicking through to the original link now, their banners made my viewing window quite small, so I had to scroll to see the whole dress. At the beginning it was clearly white and gold, but by the time I reached the bottom of the image it was blue black and then remained that way despite scrolling back up and down. In the time it took to read the thread so far the effect seemed to reset, when I could only see the top of the I,age it was clearly YW, but “faded” to BB as I watched, without scrolling.
posted by Iteki at 10:20 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

For me, I can see the dress both ways. If I slowly expose the picture of the dress by slowly scrolling down, it starts off as blue and black, but as I continue slowly scrolling down to see more of the dress, it switches to white and gold - most of the time. It's not consistent where the switch occurs, and it doesn't always happen.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:24 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

This is an interesting video that shows an iPhone videoing the dress, then getting closer-closer-closer, the lighting changes, it (apparently) adjusts the white balance etc, and it switches from the blue/black coloring to the grey/gold, and then back.

If you're having a hard time envisioning how the same dress could possibly go through such apparent color transformations, have a look.

Personally I only see sort of bluish/purplish grey and yellowish-brownish-gold. I can also see that the photo is massively overexposed and possibly has some color-shifting of some sort due to lighting and/or camera wierdness. But I absolute can NOT understand how a person's brain or whatever would just subtract all that out to see the dress's "real" colors.

Like I totally get that the dress's "real" colors are probably different than what we're seeing in the photo, but I can't even guess as to what those colors might be, other than one is lighter and the other darker.

So all of you who can actually see blue & black, I am jealous, because your brains seem to have something in them that mine just does not have at all.
posted by flug at 10:26 PM on February 26 [4 favorites]

I have never been able to see it as anything other than white and gold, but apparently I am wrong, so I bow my head in sadness.

*checks* Yep, still white and gold. No blue or black anywhere so I think you are all lying.
posted by jokeefe at 10:34 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

jokeefe, samesies.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 12:12 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Thank you chavenet for this look back, we've added it to the blue sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 2:42 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]

> Has anyone found the original photographer (or even looked for them)?

Beeb article. I feel like the "mother of the bride wearing white" axis of the psychosocial drama never got explored enough.
posted by lucidium at 4:31 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]

For "I can hear a difference in $2000 audio cables" values of "you"....

Too much snark can be an intoxicant. This is a well studied in multiple fields – I first learned about it photography, then used that knowledge supporting desktop publishing, and again for neuroscientists studying the mechanisms of visual perception – and it’s not only real but pretty easy to see as simply as putting two things side by side, and there are many decades of research studies measuring how humans perceive color and how that sense can be skewed (for example, by unexpected lighting). The dress debate was a product of low-end camera meeting cheap low-fidelity displays. It wouldn’t have happened if the photo had been taken and viewed on calibrated devices but at the time only Apple was doing that consistently in the consumer space (this was quite annoying for putting imagery on the web when only some browsers did color management and cheap phone/netbook displays favored high-contrast low-detail versions).

This is also the other side of the reason why we do know that the thousand dollar audio cables are a scam: people have done controlled studies and know that those cables do not produce perceptible differences. It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon because most of the people buying those are old enough to have experienced the earlier analog period of home sound where you could hear fairly noticeable differences by upgrading, and they trained themselves to think that trend would always be true even as the market matured and blind tests showed that quality had plateaued.
posted by adamsc at 4:45 AM on February 27 [3 favorites]

Don't forget the auditory version from around the same time.
posted by delicious-luncheon at 6:04 AM on February 27 [3 favorites]

XKCD
posted by indexy at 6:16 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]

I've seen Dell monitors of the same model number placed side by side that were displaying visibly different coloration.

Yeah, that's what colorimeters and color calibration profiles are for.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:42 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]

This was not caused by color calibration, people looking at the same screen saw different things. What I find interesting is that it was a three way switch unlike the usual duo color illusions. You had brains that read it as overexposed and corrected it to the (actual) blue and black, you had brains that read as in shadow and corrected it to white and gold, and you had brains like mine that apparently said "I do not have enough context, have it raw!" and presented it as the actual pixel colors.
posted by tavella at 10:29 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]

I know, tavella; my comment was part of a side-discussion in this thread.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:38 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]

This was not caused by color calibration, people looking at the same screen saw different things.

I'd be interested to know what those people see when they look at the Slate link lead picture, which shows the dress in both color formats side by side in a collage.

I personally see white yellow first/blue black second.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:46 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

With my art background, I’ve always been on the non-side of color being a context thing, and therefore the argument is kinda pointless.

My *actual* experience looking at the photo today was to see white and gold, but then i covered up the overexposed part of the image and my brain quickly updated it to black and blue, even when the whole image was visible again.
posted by itesser at 3:15 PM on February 27 [2 favorites]

Yeah, that's what colorimeters and color calibration profiles are for.
posted by Greg_Ace

Right, the point of buying expensive monitors for this stuff is that they need less frequent manual color calibration, or in some cases even handle it automatically themselves (cheap commodity monitors maintain color calibrations very poorly in a lot of cases!). The market exists for a reason, in much the same way that there really is a reason why there are cameras specifically designed to target video professionals instead of everyone slapping their foreheads at a layperson's suggestion to Why Not Just™ use a Canon Rebel for everything.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:08 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

True, however your original comment seemed to suggest that it was impossible for anything but an insanely expensive monitor to reliably hold a calibration for a reasonable length of time, that's what I'm responding to. In my personal experience as an amateur digital photographer it's not necessary to spend more than $300-400 for a monitor that perfectly holds its calibration for a year or more (even then the difference before and after re-calibration is barely discernible - and I've got better than average color discernment). I don't think anyone but the most dedicated high-end professional would find that onerous or evidence of a cheapo product. Now I've restated that point enough and no longer want to contribute to this derail.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:01 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

right, I mostly originally meant that the reason why people would disagree so widely was because of how vastly inconsistent any two smartphone or computer displays are generally going to be, sort of like how the Yanny/Laurel illusion can be affected by the nature of speaker bass/treble

anyway I think we can all agree that the dress was Yanny
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:44 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

WHAT!? We are now enemies.
/s
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:05 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

I too remember being a friend's house for dinner and drinks when this happened and we were all agog about comparing our perceptions of the dress.

This reminds me that on my first ever business trip out of college in the last 90s to San Francisco with my boss and a coworker. We ended up in a hotel bar that had name like "The Red Room" whose gimmick was that everything from the lights to the decor and furniture was red. After a few hours in there our color perception was royally fucked up. I distinctly remember green Heineken bottles appearing to be bright blue.
posted by mmascolino at 6:35 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]

Wow. That bar sounds cool and also like some sort of labour violation.
posted by lucidium at 12:00 PM on March 1 [1 favorite]