this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
533 points (91.7% liked)
Mildly Interesting
26945 readers
262 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's such a strange thing. For most of the illusions I can trick my brain to perceive both variants. This one is clearly black and blue. I can see that the black parts isolated can appear golden in the light, but for the life of me I can't see it any other than blue. Brains are weird.
I wonder how much of this depended on the differences in device screens. In 2015 there was a lot more variability in display technology, lower resolutions in general and worse color fidelity. OLED was uncommon and expensive, you probably only had an IPS display if you worked in graphic arts, and a lot of people were still using standard LCD monitors backlit with fluorescent tubes, which meant that the black depth was limited and the detail in dark regions of an image was frequently not visible on the screen.
I remember showing a woman at work it, from my phone. She saw it as the opposite to me and another coworker. Me and the other coworker were stunned.
Just looked up the origonal dress pic on my pixel 8 pro. Its still white and gold to me. I've only ever seen it as black and blue (without aid) a handful of times since the day it went viral. In sure screens could influence this, but this damn thing stands as a powerful illusion on its own.
In the drawing, the surrounding background and the hard black lines on the lighter version are probably causing that we don't compensate the light in the same way in both drawings. We are not given the same picture like it happened with the original photo.
Yes and they are extremely flawed too.
The only reason we think we are smart, is that every other life-form we know of is even stupider.
To be fair, we’re the ones who makes the definition and therefore can make them fit our, in many cases, fragile ego. We’re only the most intelligent animal because our definition of intelligence is based on our self.
True, luckily many modern researchers are less biased. A lot of the bias is from religions, that claim that humans are special.
From modern research we now know that we are not special in many many aspects. Apart from being a bit more intelligent, we are clearly the same in more ways than we are different.
It's funny; I have a pretty extreme night light filter (i.e. blue is almost completely removed) and even through that it at best looks.. maybe gray and black?
Then when i turn the filter off it just becomes hilariously obviously blue. Like.. It's blue: you can tell by the way blue light is hitting the retina 🤯. At most i could stretch myself to consider it purple-ish, but that's just blue with some red mixed in..
But yeah i can theoretically understand thinking the black is golden, though even then it's just not quite right for me to ever see it. Like if the light was significantly exaggerated THEN i could probably force my brain into considering the black parts to genuinely be at least dark gold material.