Team WBOC Weighs in on The Dress Debate

The Internet is in an uproar over ‘The Dress.’ Everyone is talking about the picture of a dress that went viral on Thursday, February 26. Social media is filled with arguments on what color the dress actually is, and some friendships may have even been ruined over this debate. What colors do you see? White & gold? Or blue and black? Could this be the next plane on the treadmill?

It all started on a Tumblr page where a user posted a photo of the dress that had the caption: “guys please help me – is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are [freaking out.]”

Today, we went around the office at WBOC and took a poll:

Team White & Gold

• Shannel Douglas
• Lisa Bryant
• Rachel Rae
• Emily Stern
• Brittany Cooper
• Lauren Hitch
• Chris Weimer
• Bill Mich
• Sean Streicher
• David Gordon

Team Blue & Black

• Jimmy Hoppa
• Megan Runser
• Paul Butler
• Evan Koslof
• Mikea Turner
• Lisa Moy

The Verdict:

Most WBOC employees think that the dress is white and gold. However, the dress is actually blue and black. But, team white and gold is not alone. According to a Buzzfeed survey, 74% see white and gold, while 26% see blue and black.

The debate is all over social media! Twitter users were posting their opinions all afternoon:

However, there is actually some science behind all this. Your eyes have retinas which let you interpret color through cones and rods. The cones see color and the rods see shades, like black, white, and grey. However, the cones only work when enough light passes through. Therefore, if two people are looking at the same thing but each see a different color, it is because the cones are not responding to the dim lighting.

Here is some more science on how our eyes work from wired.com:

“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.”

Andy Rexford posted a tweet giving his personal explanation for people seeing different colors while looking at the same picture:

“As for the black bit (which I see as gold), it’s called additive mixing. Blue, green and red are the main colors for additive mixing. This is where it gets really tricky. Subtractive mixing, such as with paint, means the more colors you add the murkier it gets until its black. ADDITIVE mixing, when you add the three colors the eyes see best, red, green and blue, (not to be confused with primary colors red, blue and yellow) it makes pure white.

• Blue and Black: In conclusion, your retina’s cones are more high functioning, and this results in your eyes doing subtractive mixing.
• White and Gold: our eyes don’t work well in dim light so our retinas rods see white, and this makes them less light sensitive, causing additive mixing, (that of green and red), to make gold.”

Another idea of what it might be is how the brain interprets the light coming into your retina. Cedar Riener, associate professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College, says “This light, called luminance, is always a combination of how much light is shining on an object and how much it reflects off of the object’s surface.”

“In the case of the dress, some people are deciding that there is a fair amount of illumination on a blue and black (or less reflective) dress. Other people are deciding that it is less illumination on a white/gold dress (it is in shadow, but more reflective),” Riener says.

Photoshop tells us that the places some people see as blue do indeed track as blue. But, that probably has more to do with the background than the actual color.