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'The Dress' Illusion



What colour do you perceive this dress as? Blue-black or White-gold?


Why do we perceive different colours from this image? This is due to the failure of colour constancy!

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What is colour constancy?

Colour constancy suggests that regardless of the lighting in the environment, we can always identify the colour of the object.

Normally when we look at an object (eg. a red apple), we rely on surrounding cues such as reflection, lighting, and etc to recognize the object including its colours. While perceiving the colours of an object, the tone of the lighting (either warm or cool tone) would affect the colour perception.

The dress illusion happened due to the failure of colour constancy which is caused by the unusual similarity of the lighting towards both warm and cool tone. In other words, when we should be seeing the same dress colour regardless the tone of the lighting, we actually perceive different colours of the same dress.

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Dress illusion Explanations

Q: Why do some people see a white-gold dress?

A: Their brain perceived the bright light in the image as a cool (blue-ish) lighting. Once their brain thinks the lighting is cool, it will reduce the perceived blue in the dress, resulting in perceiving more gold and white in the dress. Studies has also indicated that people who are more used to daylight would perceive the dress as white-gold.

Q: Why do some people see a blue-black dress?

A: Their brain perceived the bright light as warm (yellow-ish) lighting. Once their brain thinks its a warm lighting, it will reduce the perceived yellow in the dress, resulting in perceiving more blue and black in the dress.
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In short, the perception of the lighting (cool or warm) had led us to make different assumptions about the colour of the dress. 

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References/Resources:

  1. Brainard, D. H., & Hurlbert, A. C. (2015). Colour vision: understanding# TheDress. Current Biology, 25(13), R551-R554.
  2. Lafer-Sousa, R., Hermann, K. L., & Conway, B. R. (2015). Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by ‘the dress’ photograph. Current Biology, 25(13), R545-R546.
  3. What is the deal with this goddamned Dress?
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