The mother of the bride wore white and gold. Or was it blue and black?
From a photograph the bride posted of the dress online, no one could agree. A few days after the wedding last weekend on the Scottish island of Colonsay, a member of the wedding band was so frustrated by the lack of consensus that she posted a picture of the dress on Tumblr, and asked her followers for feedback.
“I was just looking for an answer because it was messing with my head,” said Caitlin McNeill, a 21-year-old singer and guitarist.
Within a half-hour, her post attracted some 500 likes and shares. Within an hour, that number grew to tens of thousands. The photo soon migrated to BuzzFeed and Facebook and Twitter, setting off a social-media conflagration that few were able to resist.
As the debate caught fire across the Internet – even scientists could not agree on what was causing the discrepancy – media companies rushed to get stories online. Less than a half-hour after Ms. McNeil’s original Tumblr post, BuzzFeed posted a poll: “What Colors Are This Dress?” As of Friday morning, it had been viewed more than 28 million times. (White and gold was winning handily.)
At its peak, more than 670,000 people were simultaneously viewing BuzzFeed’s post. Between that and the rest of BuzzFeed’s blanket coverage of the dress on Thursday night, the site easily smashed its prior records for traffic.
Everyone, it seems, had an opinion. And everyone was convinced that he, or she, was right.
“I don’t understand this odd dress debate and I feel like it’s a trick somehow,” Taylor Swift wrote on Twitter. “PS it’s OBVIOUSLY BLUE AND BLACK.”
“IT’S A BLUE AND BLACK DRESS!” wrote Mindy Kaling. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME,” she continued, including an unprintable modifier for emphasis.
Celebrity couples were torn asunder by the controversy. “I see white & gold,” wrote Kim Kardashian West. “Kanye sees black and blue, who is color blind?”
Politicians were eager to stake out their positions. “I know three things,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy on Twitter. “1) the ACA works; 2) climate change is real; 3) that dress is gold and white.”
Sorry, senator. The dress, as we all now know, was blue and black. It goes for 50 pounds at Roman Originals, a British retailer.
In an era when just about everyone seems to be doing anything they can to ignite interest online, the great dress debate went viral the old-fashioned way. It just happened.
Unlike other Internet sensations — remember Alex from Target, the 16-year-old Justin Bieber lookalike (and Target employee) whose picture lit up the smartphones of teenagers across the country last fall? — this was less an Internet meme than a national, even international, conversation. Or maybe argument.
At its center was a simple yet bedeviling mystery with an almost old-fashioned, trompe l’oeil quality: How could different people see the same article of clothing so differently? The simplicity of the debate, the fact that it was about something as universal as the color of a dress, made it all the more irresistible.
“This definitely felt like a special thing,” said BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, Ben Smith. “It sort of erased the line between web culture and real culture.”
The Internet, and social media in particular, are known for accelerating and accentuating divisions. In a sense, the dress debate was no different. It, too, hinged on a matter of perception. Only in this case, the polarization wasn’t ideological, or political, or racial. It was physical, based on how our brains were processing visual information. And it was harmless.
“It was delightful,” said Mr. Smith. Unless, of course, you happened to be with someone who saw white and gold when you saw black and blue. Or vice-versa.
Various theories were floated about why the dress looks different to different people. (No, if you see the darker hues of blue and black it doesn’t mean that you are depressed.)
Duje Tadin, associate professor for brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, says it may be due to variations in the number of photoreceptors called cones in the retina that perceive the color blue. The human eye has about six million cones that are sensitive to green, red or blue. Signals from the cones go to the brain, which interprets them as color.
“It’s puzzling,” conceded Dr. Tadin. “When it comes to color, blue is always the weird one. We have the fewest number of blue cones. It’s possible there is something unusual happening with the blue color in this image that is causing this. If you don’t have very many blue cones, you may see it as white, or if you have plenty of blue cones, you may see more blue.”
Joseph Toscano, an assistant professor in the Villanova University Department of Psychology and an expert in illusions, said the image seems to be a type of reversible figure, or a figure that can be interpreted in two different ways. The classic example of this is the Necker cube, a drawing of a three-dimensional cube that seems to be facing one way to some viewers, and another way to others.
“Your interpretation depends on several factors, such as which part of the figure you attend to,” Dr. Toscano said. “Something similar is likely going on with the dress.”
The one thing scientists could agree on was that this is a very unusual illusion. People who see the dress one way do not eventually begin to see it the other way, as is common with many optical illusions. “This clearly has to do with individual differences in how we perceive the world,” said Dr. Tadin. “There’s something about this particular image that just captures those differences in a remarkable way.”
Demand has been high, to say the least, since Ms. McNeill’s post went viral.
“My phone wouldn’t stop vibrating at about 5 o’clock this morning,” Roman Original’s creative manager, Ian Johnson, said in an interview from Birmingham, England.
Mr. Johnson wouldn’t specify how many of the dresses Roman Originals have sold since the company was identified as its manufacturer, but he said the dress was responsible for 60 percent of the company’s business on Friday.
The woman who unwittingly unleashed the pandemonium watched it unfold on her iPhone in a hotel in Oban, Scotland. “I’ve just been going through my Twitter and pretty much every celebrity I know has been making reference to it and that’s just totally insane,” Ms. McNeill said.
At one point, she added, the notifications on her Tumblr page were streaming in so furiously that her phone almost burned itself out in the palm of her hand. “I turned it off and let it cool down for a while and it was fine,” she said.
After the wedding, Ms. McNeill left Colonsay to return to her college on the island North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. High winds left her stranded on the mainland in Oban. It was there, in her hotel room on Thursday evening, that she posted the picture of the dress.
And the craziness began.
The bride is still on her honeymoon in Jamaica. As of Friday morning anyway, Ms. McNeill hadn’t spoken with her since her post blew up. “I don’t really want to harass her on her honeymoon,” she said. “But I think it might have gotten to the point where she has to know.”
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