From my quick accidental experiment, I think that what you see is related to your visual experience in the preceding minutes.

I too was looking at this and thinking, "How can anyone say that that dress looks white and gold?" I could only see blue and black.

I went outside to get lunch, came back, got yet another dress picture in my social feed but lo, it was white and gold...!

My immediate assumption was that I had seen a doctored image but having gone back to this post, where I previously could only see blue and black, I could now only see white and gold.

My hypothesis is therefore that the type of light you've recently been experiencing influences how your brain interprets the colours in the dress image.

Going from daylight into artificial fluorescent lighting gives White/Gold. But, after some time under fluorescent lighting it turns Blue/Black. For me this hypothesis is somewhat supported by the fact that now that I've been back inside for 20 minutes the dress is Blue/Black again.

I'm suddenly reminded of my experience of the Chromosaturation installation by Carlos Cruz-Diez that I saw at the Hayward Gallery Light Show Exhibition. [1]

This was a trio of rooms which were saturated with either blue, red or green light. On entering each room everything appeared tinted with the colour of the light. However, after 5 minutes the brain had restored the perceived balance to normal. You could entirely forget that you were in a colour saturated room.

When moving to another of the rooms the effect began again but with everything tinted whatever colour the new room was saturated in before gradually adapting back to "normal".

I think this supports my above hypothesis. The brain takes some time to adjust to new light sources and will skew perceived colours for a short time after changing the ambient light source.

[1] http://www.designboom.com/art/carlos-cruz-diez-circumstance-...

I used to work in a dark room used for silkscreening, where the only lights in the room were yellow. After only a few minutes I'd stop noticing the yellow light. When I'd leave the room at the end of my shift, everything was extremely blue for a few minutes before returning to normal. It's neat how we are able to quickly adapt to such situations.

I am in the opposite situation. I've tried all the tricks/explanations and different monitors and devices. I don't understand how the dress could be black and dark blue.

When I saw the actual picture of the dress in good lighting I questioned my sanity. :)

Thanks for explaining. I question my sanity when I see lots of comments and can't tell what's so exciting about a black & blue dress you can change the lighting for.

I'm here as well. I've seen tons of adjusted versions at this point (25+) and zero of them have had white.

I do get a gold tint on the black, for sure, but if I were asked the colors of the dress, it's still unquestionably blue & black, the whole photo just looks like it has a sickly yellow tint on it.

Edit: I should have said I get the gold tint when I slide the slider to the yellow (right).

That's so weird to me, I have trouble seeing blue & black - looks gold and white to me at all times

I'm still not convinced the white and gold people aren't just trolling.

I want to know what some tetrachromacic people see.

Since the monitors themselves are RGB, I don't think tetrachomats will see anything different.

I was seeing white and gold this morning. Read the reddit post, somebody had done a contrast adjustment showing the black/dark brown and blue and when I saw that, front that point onward I only see blue/brown (still don't see the black, it's a dark brown to me).

The funny thing is, this morning when I first "got it", the blue was very light, and I've been looking at the original tumbler throughout the day and I swear it's getting darker blue every time.

Now I can't even see the white and it's kind of blowing my mind. I remember the WTF moment when people said it was blue/black and only seeing white/gold, but I just can't reverse it and see it again.

I see the blue when I adjust the scale, but can still make out some gold at the top.

right, there's no lighting scenario in which black fabric looks gold.

Objectively the photograph is light blue and brown. It's not even a proper optical illusion, it's just what your assumptions are about lighting and exposure, if you're trying to determine the colors of the actual object from a bad photo.

I guess I understand what you mean. I can see the brown when it's pulled off to the side with a hex code, but in the context of the picture, I would always answer that the (brown) part of the dress is "black."

Making the image smaller/cropped/etc doesn't really change that, for whatever reason. Maybe my brain is remembering the context.

Have you tried it on different monitors? I have a UX303LN monitor (notorious for bad rendering of yellow colors) and the dress is very hard not to see as white/gold.

It doesn't really have an effect. I showed it to a friend on the same monitor and we got totally different perceptions.