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What Color Is This Dress?
A photo of a dress has created an Internet frenzy over its colors: blue and black or white and gold?
BY CODY CRANE
Last week, a picture of a dress sparked a huge debate on the Internet. The reason? People couldn’t seem to agree on the garment’s colors.

A British woman posted an image of it on the social media site Tumblr. Some people looking at the image thought it was blue with black lace. Others argued that it was white with gold lace. That’s a huge difference!

One website that took a poll about the dress’s color received more than 28 million responses—with white and gold getting the most votes. Even celebrities like Taylor Swift took to Twitter to weigh in. She thought the dress looked blue and black. Guess what? According to the store based in Birmingham, England, that designed the article of clothing, the singer was right.

What could cause so many people to see such vastly different things? Scientists have come up with a few theories that have to do with how our eyes perceive color.

COLOR CHANGE EXPLAINED

The retina, a layer of tissue that lines the back of the eye, contains millions of light-detecting cells. Some of these cells, called cones, sense colors, like red, blue, and green. Duje Tadin, a scientist who studies the brain and vision at the University of Rochester in New York, told The New York Times that the number of blue cones a person has may determine how well they see that color.

“If you don’t have very many blue cones, you may see [the dress] as white,” says Tadin. “If you have plenty of blue cones, you may see more blue.”

The lighting conditions when the photo was taken could also have been a reason for the confusion. Some people’s eyes may be more sensitive to different color hues, like blue or yellow, that make up the background light illuminating (lighting up) the dress. Their brains may adjust for this by dialing down these shades of color when looking at the dress. This can alter how the person perceives the dress’s color.

Bevil Conway is an associate professor of neuroscience at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He told technology site Wired that “people either [dismiss] the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.”

A SIGHT SENSATION

No matter what the explanation for the color-shifting dress is, the outfit has definitely created quite a stir. People have started snapping up the $77 frocks. Last Friday, the 300 dresses available for sale online sold out in just half an hour.

Scientists agree that the colors the person sees in the dress seem to be hardwired to the person looking at it. Unlike most optical illusions (tricks of the eye), people can’t change the colors they see by staring harder, crossing their eyes, or changing their perspective. Blue and black or white and gold—what do you see?[img]http://magazines.scholastic.com/news/2015/03/What-Color-Is-This-Dress[/img]