What color is the dress?

[SkynJay]

It is blue with a metallic gold trimming.

You are welcome. Thank you internet for making me look.

[FireAndBlood.]

I thought the same at first, but after finding the actual dress, it looks blue and black.

[flrtwtrble]

It's brilliant marketing!

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

The actual dress is blue and black, but the real question is what do you see in that specific photo.

Since some poll had about 78% of people seeing it as white and gold, I'm assuming there's something Mendelian going on here.

[Dr. Pepper]

The color dress I see has changed depending on whether or not I'm wearing contacts or glasses. With contacts, I see white and gold. With glasses, blue and black.

[Inigima]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2015/02/27/blue_and_black_or_white_and_gold_the_two_women_behind_the_dress_definitively.html

[Nymeria10k]

This is all I've seen on my fb all day. :lol:

It was white and gold the first time I looked at it on my computer, blue and black when I saw it on my phone screen. Although on my computer I can see a tinge of blue, it doesn't appear pure white. Some sciency-thing explains it all but personally I have no clue :lol:

My mum says it's blue and gold.

[all swedes are racist]

The only thing I can tell for sure is.... It's kinda ugly.

[DJDonegal]

I don't know how often some people clean their bedsheets, but there's nothing white about that dress.

[Born Yesterday]

Some sciency-thing explains it all but personally I have no clue

The science side of things: io9, Wired.

Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. 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. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you’re looking at. 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.” (Neitz sees white-and-gold.)

Usually that system works just fine. This image, though, hits some kind of perceptual boundary. That might be because of how people are wired. Human beings evolved to see in daylight, but daylight changes color. That chromatic axis varies from the pinkish red of dawn, up through the blue-white of noontime, and then back down to reddish twilight. “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,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. “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.” (Conway sees blue and orange, somehow.)

(I saw white and gold, and when I tilted the screen I saw brown and blue.)

[Theda Baratheon]

It's blue and black.

[Summah]

I see it different ways. Sometimes just scrolling down a page with a photo of it and then back up again makes it change color. I think it's nicer looking in blue and black.

[Fez]

I see it as either white and gold or blue and gold depending on how much I squint. But I never ever see black in it, and the blue I do sometimes see is not nearly as dark a blue as it apparently actually is.

[Theda Baratheon]

I have only seen it as blue and black.

[mashiara]

I'm sick of seeing the damn dress on FB all day long, as if there's nothing else people could talk about.

It always looks blue and black to me.

[Liffguard]

Is this some sort of elaborate practical joke? It's blue and black. It's clearly blue and black. It's as blue and black as my current avatar. What gives?

[Maltaran]

The first photo I saw was white and gold. The second time it was blue and black.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

It varies depending upon the lighting?

[Dr. Pepper]

Is this some sort of elaborate practical joke? It's blue and black. It's clearly blue and black. It's as blue and black as my current avatar. What gives?

70% of people on buzzfeed see it as white and gold.

[Fez]

It varies depending upon the lighting?

Not the lighting per se, because its a still image and we're all seeing the same lighting. But how people are interpreting the lighting is probably the reason for the difference.

Sort of like how the 'A' and 'B' squares in this image are actually the exact same color, but almost no one can see that.