A photo of a dress that seemed to be playing tricks on the eyes took the Internet by storm Thursday night, but experts said science, not trickery, explains what's going on.
The photo shows a dress that some say is blue and black. But others insist it's white and gold. The picture went viral after it was posted Thursday night by a person who said she and her friends were also seeing the different colors.
Many found the phenomenon particularly troubling because two people standing side by side looking at the same image on the same screen could see what appeared to be radically different colors.
A lot of theories were proposed about what was happening, including that there was some sort of technological trick being played or that the colors people saw depended on their mood.
But University of New Hampshire associate professor of psychology Bill Stine said the effect is a result of how light enters the eye and is processed by the brain.
"If you change the color of the light, you can change the color balance of a dress to make it look white and gold, or black and blue, or even something in between," he said.
For the color of an object to seem ambiguous, the lighting has to be just right, and it is in the photo, Stine said. He said that when you look at the picture, your brain may emphasize one of the colors and mute another because of how your brain is interpreting how the image is lit.
"The neuroscience behind it is deep," Stine said. "The behavior behind it is deep, but when we build these theories, you can test them by looking at things."
Stine said anyone seeing the dress in person won't have a problem seeing the true colors of the dress: black and blue.
"Because the person would be moving and you would be moving, and that part, due to the reflection of the light, would be changing every time you move, and so it would become unambiguous, just immediate," he said.
The dress sells for $77, and the British company that makes it reported it saw a nearly 350 percent increase in sales Friday.
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