One year ago, BuzzFeed unearthed photo of a seemingly ordinarydresson Tumblr.
People who saw the dress couldn’t seem to decide in an epic optical illusion. Quickly, the Internet began losing its mind over the garment. Therefore, the BuzzFeed article exploded with more than 38 million readers arguing overthe dress’ colors.
The Dressbegan on this Tumblr page, where an user posted a dress photo with the caption, guys please help me -is this dress whitish and gold, or blue and blackish? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the f k out.
It has to do with rods and cones in our retinas. We have three cones types, each tuned to pick up dark green, redish, or dark blue wavelengths of light. Usually, business Insider’s Dina Spector breaks it down. Now let me tell you something. The image lighting, which has a bluish tint, appears to be what is throwing people’s brains off. In person, the dress is clearly light blue and grey. Consequently, our brains determine the color that we see by blending the signals that each receptor senses like how a TV screen made of millions of ‘differentcolored’ pixels makes an image. That’s interesting.
It makes the blueish part look almost white and grey part look gold. The receptors turn these colors into electrical signals that are sent to the brain, when light hits our eyes.