Why do some people see black and blue and some people see white and gold in the same picture?

Question: Why do some people see black and blue and some people see white and gold in the same picture?
- Keywords:
  #thedress,
  colour,
  eyesight
Asked by Lucy and Meg to Hephzi, Imogen, Jen, Jennifer, Tom on 11 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by scxrlxtt, Samantha Devaney.
- Thomas Barrett answered on 11 Mar 2015:
  
  Ahhh I see you have been looking at dresses on the internet 😛
  
  What I think is weird is I saw White and Gold first but the longer I stare at the dress the more it turns to blue and black (Blue and Black is the real dress colour).
  
  It is all to do which part of the incoming light your brain decides is not from the object and get rid of.
  
  Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. 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.
  
  People either discount 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.
  
  Here’s a link to why they think it happens.
  http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
- Jen Machin answered on 11 Mar 2015:
  
  I saw blue and black first 🙂
  
  Tom has explained it well. Sometimes your brain can play lots of tricks on you! That’s why I like to study it so much – we still have a lot to learn. It really depends on how your brain interprets the image, whether it sees it as if there was a shadow on the photo (then you’ll probably see white and gold) or not (then you’ll probably see blue and black). Changing the background colour of the picture also gives the brain different clues about what colour the dress might be.
- Jennifer Rudd answered on 11 Mar 2015:
  
  I saw gold and white! I thought it was really interesting watching a youtube clip of “the science show” talking about it and they were saying it was to do with perception and all of the different ways the image had been altered with lighting, background, filters etc. It just shows that you should never believe what you see without questioning it!
- Hephzi Tagoe answered on 11 Mar 2015:
  
  The dress colour will definately make the end of year list of best news headlines. I saw black and blue first. 🙂