Everything you should know about the internet debate surrounding 'The Dress'

(Image credit: Swiked.tumblr.com)

If you've spent any time on the internet within in the last 24 hours, you've likely heard about "The Dress."

The fierce debate all started thanks to a Tumblr post from user swiked, who posted a photo of a dress and asked, "guys please help me — is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the f--k out."

The debate raged. Celebrities weighed in. We learned that The Dress is actually black and blue, but that the lighting in the photo affects how we perceive its colors. Wired asked a neuroscientist to help explain the phenomenon:

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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. "Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance," says Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. "But I've studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen." [Wired]

CNN confirmed The Dress' colors on the air, and Amazon reviewers started posting snarky comments on the item's page. And news outlets everywhere struggled to wring more meaning out of the story as The Dress Debate raged on.

Perhaps the one thing we can agree on is that the The Dress has captured the attention of people everywhere: At the time of publication, BuzzFeed's meme-launching original post on The Dress had upwards of 27 million pageviews.

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Samantha Rollins is TheWeek.com's news editor. She has previously worked for The New York Times and TIME and is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.