In the midst of the color debate, there’s one thing the Internet does seem to agree upon.
That dress is not cute.
Whether folks were team white and gold or team blue and black, the common consensus across social media seemed to be that it is far from the height of fashion.
Wired has attempted to explain the science behind the debate that has split us all. The battle, it says, “is about more than just social media — it’s about primal biology and the way human eyes and brains have evolved to see color in a sunlit world.”
“Light enters the eye through the lens — different wavelengths corresponding to different colors,” writes Wired’s Adam Rogers. “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.”
Usually this process works fine, Rogers writes, but the image of this particular dress is “some kind of perceptual boundary.”
“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,” Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College, told Wired. “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.”
For the record, Conway sees blue and black when he looks at the dress.
According to Mashable, the frock can be purchased for $77 from the British site Roman Originals. Mashable also collected some of the best Amazon reviews, including one that simply read, “This dress is why I have trust issues.”
