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

(Image credit: Swiked.tumblr.com)

published 27 February 2015

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."

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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]

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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.

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