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| Ruiz, Marco. "The Dress". 2/27/2015 via Flickr. Attribution -ShareAlike Generic 2.0 |
In February of 2015, Scottish couple Grace and Kier Johnston were to be married- so naturally Grace's mother needed something to wear to the wedding. She and her husband Paul went shopping at a store called Roman Originals, where she snapped a photo of a blue and black dress made of lace and silk and sent it to her daughter for approval. Grace said that it was lovely- but also that it was gold and white. Cecilia (Grace's mother) also saw it as white and gold in the photo, even though the dress is actually blue and black- but disregarded this and bought it anyway, spent the £50 and wore it to the wedding.
A few days after the wedding, on February 26th, a friend of the couple who attended the wedding posted the picture of the dress on her Facebook and Tumblr (posts which have since been removed) asking what color everyone thought it was, because she and her friends couldn't agree. Later that same day, Buzzfeed posted their first article about the photo, which was when it really started to gain popularity and go viral. And as it turned out, nobody in the rest of the world could agree either.
It broke Buzzfeed records with 37 million views and two editorial teams assigned to writing articles only regarding the dress. The photo proceeded to take over every social media facet, primarily Twitter, taking on the hashtag #dressgate. Everyone started weighing in- from everyday citizens to politicians to celebrities to reporters. I can even speak from personal experience- once a whole half of a high school english class was used arguing over what color the dress appeared.
Since then neuroscientists have explained why different people see different colors in this photo, (spoiler alert: it has to do with the discounting of chromatic bias that our brain does automatically- but more on that later) but the fact remains it will always be a debate.
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