The Truth About #TheDress

In February of 2015, Paul Jinks and his then-girlfriend, Cecilia Bleasdale, were shopping at an outlet mall near Liverpool, England.

Cecilia was looking for something in particular, a blue dress to wear to her daughter's wedding.

She found these three dresses, all blue, and she each go, I don't know, I don't know which one.

So she goes, I know, I'm going to take a picture of each and send them to her daughter, Grace.

Paul held up the three dresses in turn, and Cecilia took a picture of each of them with her cell phone.

And then she texted all three photos to her daughter.

Yeah, they all look all right, but I thought you said they're all blue.

I said, well, they are.

And she's going, well, the third one you sent was gold and white.

Paul was holding the dress in question in his hands as these texts were coming in.

It was undoubtedly a royal blue dress with black lace detailing.

Then Cecilia held up a phone to me and says, what colour is that?

I went, oh, it does look gold and white in the picture.

And that's where it started from.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

In the history of viral images, the dress has got to be in the top 10.

This unassuming photograph of a party dress kicked off a global what the hell when people realized they were seeing it completely differently.

In today's episode, we're going down the optical rabbit hole known as the dress.

We'll watch it achieve global infamy, burrow into how it works with a scientist who's been studying it for years, and explore the unexpectedly big questions it raises about what is true and how we know it.

So today, on decodering, why do we see different colors when we look at the dress?

And why does it matter?

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Okay,

so the photo of the dress is now on two cell phones, Cecilia Bleasdale's and her daughter's.

And I want to stick with it as it begins to make its way out into the world.

Its first stop was Facebook, where Cecilia's daughter Grace posted it soon after receiving it from her mother.

There was a lot of chatter about it, but it stayed contained.

She was living on a Scottish island.

So it basically just stayed on the island.

Soon after Grace's wedding, though, a friend posted the image to Tumblr.

It was Thursday, February 26th, 2015.

Like late afternoon, BuzzFeed got a message.

Kate Holderness is now the head of editorial at Tumblr, but at the time she was a community moderator at BuzzFeed.

And she also ran all of the site's Tumblr accounts.

So I get this message from some random follower saying like, BuzzFeed, please help.

I posted a picture of a dress.

Some people are seeing it as.

blue and black and some people are seeing it as white and gold.

Like, can you explain?

We're losing it.

And I was like, okay.

Cates clicked on the post.

All she saw was a blue dress.

I just want to underscore that the first time you see this picture, it appears entirely unremarkable.

It looks exactly like what it is, a quickly snapped photo.

And whatever color you see it as, there's no shimmering or electric quality to it.

It's as solid as a potato.

It's the kind of image you'd have thrown in a box back when we got photographs printed and the kind you'd probably delete now when you needed to free up some space on your phone.

Needless to say, Kate's was unimpressed.

She got back to work on another viral phenomenon.

The Great Llama Watch 2015 here on Fox News channel.

All day long,

the internet had been captivated by these two llamas in Arizona who were kind of on the run.

Another one of our stations also has a chopper up.

So we're double choppering the two llamas for the day.

You know, something like the llamas, you text your friends and you're like, have you heard about the llamas?

And they hadn't heard about the llamas.

So you send them some links.

And nowadays, I feel like memes, trends, news events, they like hit, they burn, and then they're gone.

In the late afternoon, amidst the llama drama, Kate looked back at the Tumblr post of the blue dress.

She noticed there were a lot more comments on it.

So I just kind of like

turned to my colleagues and I was like, hey guys, what color is this dress?

And

at the same time, one of them said blue and black and one of them said white and gold.

Within like 10 minutes, there were dozens of people standing behind my desk screaming at each other.

You know, like the graphic designer was yelling, send me the link.

I need to isolate the colors in Photoshop.

Was it like all in good humor or like

getting heated?

No, no, no.

It was all just like this weird moment of, I don't understand how we are looking at this same thing and seeing two wildly different things.

But I figured if we were screaming about it, maybe I should post it on BuzzFeed and the rest of the internet might scream about it.

So I did.

In a couple of minutes, she'd built the post.

The headline was, what colors are this dress?

Followed by two sentences of text, a picture of the dress and a survey where you could click blue and black or white and gold.

It published around 6 p.m.

Then I immediately like signed off and like went and bought some yarn at the yarn store and then hopped on the subway to go back to Brooklyn.

So I get off the subway

and my phone has exploded.

Like I can't open Twitter.

because it crashes my phone.

I have dozens of text messages and it's all people being like,

Kates, what did you do?

Millions of people sharing this right now.

It's reaching Oscar levels on Twitter.

4 million tweets since just 6 p.m.

last night, right, TJ?

That is right.

And this thing is really breaking social media records.

The BuzzFeed post alone had over 21 million views.

The next day was

pretty wild.

Like, I stepped out of the elevators and people just started applauding.

Other websites were doing similar numbers, and the dress was all over local news and morning talk shows.

As for why people see different colors in the same photograph, experts say it's simple science.

The TV segments tended to offer some kind of hand-wavy explanation about what was going on physiologically.

It's a perception issue.

It's the way the brain processes information that everyone's brain is different.

While also assuring people there was a right answer.

And the designer confirms that the dress is black and blue.

But for all the anchor's assurances, they were having a hard time convincing anyone.

I informed one Vancouverite of that this morning, and he still says, no, it's white and gold.

No one could really believe they might be wrong.

I don't get the white and gold part.

I really don't.

I look at that knit so clearly, and then I find myself getting irritated with people that see white and gold.

As these segments were airing on North American morning news, it was early afternoon in the UK, which is when things things started to get weird for Paul and Cecilia.

It had been a regular morning.

Cecilia even went to work.

So it was just like a normal day, up until in the afternoon when her name came out.

Until then, the only person associated with the picture had been the friend who'd posted it to Tumblr.

But then a social media post mentioned that Cecilia was the person who had actually worn the dress.

And then not long after that, there were knocks at the door, all these cars and people outside.

It was like, oh my God.

The Ellen DeGeneres show called and wanted an exclusive.

By 3 a.m.

UK time, just a little over 24 hours after the BuzzFeed post went live, Paul and Cecilia and her daughter and husband and friend were on a plane to California.

This is unbelievable.

I mean, you can't possibly have fathomed that this would happen.

Your mother sends you a dress

to wear at your wedding, right?

Yes, so she sent me three photos.

That's Cecilia's daughter, Grace.

Soon after, Cecilia came out on stage two, wearing the dress.

To me, that's white and gold.

Cecilia and Paul are no longer together, and I reached out to Cecilia a number of times to speak with her for this episode, but I had no luck.

Still, I've never seen Golden White.

I don't get the Golden White.

I don't get the blue and black.

Two days later, they were all on a plane back home.

When we got back from LA, which was a week later, the world had moved on.

Well, most of the world.

There was this one guy who had some questions.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

My name is Pascal Wallish, and I serve as a professor at New York University.

Pascal is a neuroscientist.

He first saw the dress the evening it went viral.

So I remember this very distinctly.

I was on my way home on the train, but I had gotten a DM from a student

and they were like, hey, Pascal, what do you think about this?

I was like, you know, it's obviously white and gold.

So I actually dismissed that.

And then I went home and I showed my wife and I was like, you know, look at this.

Look how stupid people are.

Like, I want to make a big deal out of this.

It's clearly white and gold.

And my wife, like dead pen, goes like, yeah, it's black and blue.

And in that instant, I realized we had never seen anything like that.

Pascal was born and raised in Germany.

If you Google him, you'll immediately turn up an image of him wearing a pair of sunglasses like Neo's in The Matrix.

He is particularly interested in why different people experience the same underlying reality differently.

He calls it cognitive diversity, and he was already researching it before the dress.

I mean, so when the dress hit, I was actually looking at something similar in a way, and that was like, why people if they watch the same movie, have a completely different takeaway if what that just was like i mean if it was good or bad or or what emotions it evoked and like we found not a single movie not even one where everybody kind of agreed pascal was trying to figure out scientifically why we respond to the same thing in this case a movie in the bajillions of ways we respond to movies that seems like so complicated like insanely complicated and that's actually what a lot of people told us when we started this they were like you can't study this it's it's too hard i think this sums up Pascal nicely.

Where most people see an intractably complicated problem, he sees something that might be fun and possible to solve.

When the dress came along, it struck him as one of these problems and an unprecedented one to boot.

I could have been wrong about this, but I got my PhD in this.

And I don't want to flex, but I was pretty sure that this was not known yet.

And he had a theory about what was going on.

So to understand Pascal's theory about the dress, there's some other ideas you have to understand first.

And one is color constancy.

The idea is that the brain constantly color corrects.

Take a tennis ball in that bright greenish-yellow tennis ball color.

Now put that tennis ball inside.

outside, in shadow, in the early morning, in bright mid-afternoon sun.

Wherever you take it, it still registers as the color of a tennis ball.

But if you took a photometer and measured the illumination coming off that tennis ball in all of these situations, it changes.

But rather than register that change as a different color, our brain does a little photoshopping outside of our awareness to make sure it stays tennis ball color.

You don't even notice this.

This is called color constancy.

It happens all the time.

And in fact, preserving color constancy is such a priority for our brains, you can trick them.

There's this optical illusion, an image of a strawberry tart.

We'll link to it in the show notes so you can see for yourself.

It's on a white plate on a wood table, and the whole thing has been overexposed in teal.

So everything looks a little washed out and blue.

But you can still tell the strawberries are red.

A deep strawberry red.

Except they're not.

There is no red in the image at all.

We just know strawberries are supposed to be red, and we use it as an anchor and adjust the light in the picture accordingly.

As soon as Pascal realized something strange was happening with the image of the dress, he thought it had to do with this process.

But instead of adjusting the light so we all see the same thing, like the color red, we were doing color constancy on the picture of the dress differently.

To my knowledge, it's the first time this has been done in the color domain.

And what's even more interesting, it doesn't switch.

Like it's stable.

So what made the dress so special?

One of the answers is that it's not a great picture.

So let's go back to the photo again.

Like I said, it looks exactly like what it is.

A quickie snapshot meant to elicit an up or down, is this dress okay or is this horrible gut check from a bride to be.

In the picture, the dress runs over the edges of the frame at the top, bottom, and in the upper left-hand corner.

You can't see the neckline or the hemline or make out the background.

Additionally, the phone, a Samsung Galaxy, overexposed the image, so it's very hard to tell if the picture was taken indoors or outdoors, if the dress is backlit or in shadow.

And unlike with the strawberries, there's no color acting as an anchor because a dress can be any color at all.

It all makes for a very ambiguous image.

So I have the dress right here.

Sorry, you can't see it.

Pascal was talking to me on Zoom from his lab at NYU and he had just pulled out a dress.

A copy of the dress, not a photo of one.

It wasn't the original, but it looked the same and it was from the same company, the British chain Roman Originals, which sold out the dress in 34 minutes the night the image went viral before restocking.

What color is it?

It's blue.

Ah, exactly.

So there's no uncertainty.

So the argument is not about the dress, it's about the image of the dress.

There's uncertainty because the lighting is frankly unclear.

Confronted with something so unclear, our brains do one of the other things you have to understand

to understand Pascal's theory.

They rely on what's happened before.

Let's say

you're at a staff meeting and one person, say Bob, is always late, always late.

And then there's a new staff meeting and you don't see the door and you heard someone just came in who's late.

Who would you think is late?

Who is it?

Who just came in?

It's Bob.

It's Bob.

It's always Bob, yes.

And so the idea is that if there's uncertainty, so that is if you don't know what's really going on, you're relying more on what's called your prior, your previous experience.

The thing about the Bob example is that it's happening near the conscious level.

If someone were to ask you, hey, who just walked in late?

You would be able to say, I think it's Bob because Bob's always late.

But not all priors are like this.

When your mind makes the strawberries look red, you don't know that's happening.

Instead, your brain registers the shape of the strawberries and the texture of the strawberries, and then it connects one dot that's not actually there,

the typical red color of a strawberry.

If there's uncertainty,

people don't say, I don't know, or your brain or your mind, whatever you want to call it.

There's a I don't know.

You fill in missing pieces from your previous experience, right?

And this is what Pascal thought was going on with the dress.

Confronted with the uncertainty in the picture, our brains weren't like,

I'm not sure about this one, but I'm going to take a stab at it anyway.

Please bear that in mind.

no instead they projected total confidence that is blue and black or white and gold and i know because i've seen light like that before

but why did we think that why would different people have different priors about what the likely

light is as you can probably tell by now pascal does not ask rhetorical questions he's always got an answer and the answer to this was our sleep patterns.

So a long time ago, almost 25 years, I did sleep research, but I got tired of it because it's very exhausting to hear people sleep, to be honest with you.

But what I remembered from that is that people have a chronotype.

You have a strong preference genetically whether you're going to be a morning person or whether you're going to be a night person.

They're colloquially called owls, owls, and larks.

And that's the final piece you need to understand Pascal's theory of the dress.

Okay, so the theory is as follows.

We see the dress differently because faced with an ambiguous image, we color correct according to our prior experience as a lark or owl.

More specifically, Pascal expected larks, people exposed to more daylight, to assume the light hitting the dress was daylight.

And daylight is bluish.

That means they'd subtract blue light from the image, leaving a white and gold dress.

Meanwhile, he expected owls, who theoretically spend more time under incandescent lights, to subtract their orangish illumination, thus leaving a blue and black dress.

This whole theory, everything that we've explained so far, came to Pascal quickly, Like the night he saw the dress quickly.

That evening, he wrote a piece that contained many of these ideas and posted it on his blog.

The next day, it was republished by Slate.

About a week later, he wrote a follow-up for Slate that also contained a survey to test his theory.

We asked if they fired sunlight or artificial light.

We asked if they are owls and larks, and we asked a lot of other things

that we didn't think was going to matter so that people couldn't accuse us of just fishing for correlations.

8,000 people replied.

A year later, working with his colleague Michael Karlovich, they ran a follow-up and got another 5,000 responses.

And what they found was consistent with their theory.

Larks were more likely to see white and gold, and owls were more likely to see blue and black.

The stronger you identified as a lark or as an owl, the stronger the effect was.

There were a couple of interesting additional findings.

Though the color was stable for most people, about 1% could flip back and forth.

And a good number of people flipped from seeing white and gold to blue and black after learning what color the dress really was.

People including Pascal, myself, and Robin Roberts.

But now I see black and blue.

You do?

Yeah, now I did.

No, yes, it's still learning.

And then there was a group who didn't see blue and black or white and gold at all for what I found to be the most mind-bending reason of all.

If you really look under like a photometer, the real color is neither blue and black or white and gold.

It's actually blue and gold, if that makes sense.

What?

But actual like pixels, they're blue and gold, which by the way, also about 10% of the people see.

So some people are like photographers.

They could see how it actually is.

It's actually blue and gold.

90% of us looked at this picture and saw our priors.

What we brought to this image was more powerful than what was really there.

And you don't have to be a neuroscientist to wonder what else we're seeing this way.

Though, being a neuroscientist doesn't hurt.

You know, there's a deeper reason I'm interested in this, because I suspect that this is not just going on with the dress, yes, or with perception, but in general.

How big does the dress really get?

Can it reveal something about why we believe the things that we do?

That's right after the break.

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Do you remember when the dress went viral?

Not only do I remember it, it's one of those things where if I try to talk about it in a lecture or mention it, I'll often try to open with, if you've never heard of this, and then I start to explain it, and no one has ever not heard of it.

David McRainey is a science journalist, podcaster, and author of the book, How Minds Change, which contains a whole chapter about the dress.

It's a dress.

It's a picture off the internet.

Very quickly, it ramps up to being very existential, and it's marvelous in that way.

For his book, David spent time with Pascal Wallish, and he thinks the existential meaning of the dress is all tied up with a term Pascal taught him.

He introduced this word into my vocabulary, disambiguation.

Disambiguation describes a process we mentioned earlier.

That moment your brain sees something uncertain and instead of communicating that uncertainty to you, says,

I got this 100%.

And it's that false certainty that excites me.

There's another word for this kind of false certainty.

Naive realism.

It's the idea that you're mainlining reality, basically.

It's the idea that what you experience subjectively is a one-to-one representation of what's going on out there.

Naive realism is the idea that your opinions and beliefs and observations are not interpretations.

They're objectively true.

That you see strawberries in the photo as red because they must be.

And that the dress looks blue or gold because it is.

When you see the dress, it's the truth of your own eyes, and it just is what it is.

And if it wasn't for the fact that social media is social, you might never know that other people saw it differently at all.

But social media made it impossible to miss that people really were seeing this very simple image differently.

And what's so exciting about that are the potential implications for how we see much more complicated issues.

Some things are purely an interpretation that's being filtered through your values and your attitudes and your political ideology and your groupishness and your identity.

But in the experience of it, at least at first, it often doesn't feel like any of that is at play.

It feels like this is simply the truth.

And when we believe something is true, something is obviously, inarguably no duh true, we don't brook a lot of disagreement.

And David sees that in the response to the dress.

My favorite...

cultural bizarreness of all this was how it made its way to local news.

We posted a little video on the internet and I look like a madman.

I look like somebody who's about ready to just punch somebody in the neck.

He was yelling at me.

It's about this dress.

That they'll have like just the beginning of what might actually be an argument over this picture.

And I think there's a lot to learn from that.

Specifically, he thinks there's something to learn about how we fight and how we might do it more constructively.

If we're all disambiguating all of the time, we are coming to topics with perspectives that feel as factual, as true to us as the color of the dress did.

But as with the colors of the dress, we're not going to convince each other by insisting that we're right and waving around a picture of the dress as evidence, because the evidence doesn't look the same to people.

So for David, one of the major things you can extract from the dress is a way to approach disagreements of all kinds.

I can think of almost everything issue I've ever argued with my father or online.

Like, I very rarely went into,

hey, I wonder why we disagree about this.

I was never even interested in why the other person felt the way they felt.

At NYU, they call it cognitive empathy, that moment where you accept that the other person may have no choice but to feel the way they feel or see it the way they see.

This is a lot to take from a picture off the internet, and I was of two minds about it.

David and Pascal had convinced me the dress was way more important than I had ever imagined, that it shows you your eyes can deceive you, that you are sometimes wrong when you feel most right, and that in certain situations you can get to the root of a disagreement with enough effort and open-mindedness.

But did the dress's clarity and simplicity really translate to all the gnarly ins and outs of more complicated disagreements?

What if your priors aren't based on something neutral, like sleep, but something hateful?

And how much can it really tell us about how to fight?

Because when I look at the reaction to the dress, I see people

having fun.

We actually asked everybody in the newsroom and

we made, yeah, look at that.

Black and blue one.

My favorite, though, I don't know if you can see at home, is what Chuck said at the bottom.

Chuck thinks it should be worn by Beyonce, which has nothing.

It's true that people bickered about the dress, got worked up, got loud, talked all over each other.

And it's true that some people, especially online, took it way too far.

But not most people.

I think it's white and gold.

Let's see, go around the newsroom and check what do other people think about it.

There's something childlike about the reactions to it.

It's like that childhood question, are we all seeing the same green or some people seeing purple?

Has suddenly been answered years later by the dress in the affirmative.

And that's weird and maybe even a little scary, but it's also exciting and surprising, and no one can believe it.

So they need to run around the newsroom and ask every adult there what they see.

For me, this is black and blue.

I actually see white and golden.

This is white, and this is golden.

It's very clear.

Hello?

Please, excuse me.

This is black and blue.

It's so clear.

It's black.

Where are you seeing the white and this is white?

Absolutely.

Then you're not wearing penis.

This is not blue.

It really is this marvelous thing.

It's like across the planet, every age range, every demographic, we all had this shared experience before

all the other weird experiences that are kind of like it.

When David first said this to me in the flow of our conversation, I thought he just meant other viral memes.

And we have had plenty of those.

Some extraordinarily like the dress.

Laurel.

Laurel.

Laurel.

That's a viral audio clip that some people hear as Laurel, and others hear somehow as Yanni.

But when I listened back to David's remark, it jumped out at me as one of the reasons this picture has been asked to do so much heavy lifting.

What followed it?

All of the other weird shared experiences that aren't fun viral memes at all.

Let me tell you, this election was rigged.

There is no evidence that I can see that a pandemic exists.

The official story of Sandy Hook has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

What we saw when we first looked at the dress in February of 2015 had everything to do with what had happened before, with whether we were night owls or early risers.

But now it has a lot to do with what happened after, when seeing things differently online, on site, has become so common.

In the years since the dress first appeared, our priors have changed in a way that makes the dress look way more serious than it once did.

It used to be a hoot.

Now it seems like a harbinger.

I think it's kind of the way we've become with the internet, isn't it?

Paul Jinx, who you heard from earlier, and who held the dress up as it had its famous picture taken.

People have a belief,

whether they're black or blue or white and gold, and that's my belief and I am not changing.

I don't care if you show me proof that I'm wrong.

That is my belief and I don't believe you.

Who knows how we would think of the dress if the future had unfolded differently?

In a different world, maybe the dress wouldn't be asked to mean so much.

Maybe it could just be an unprecedented optical illusion that made you look at your friends, your colleagues, your loved ones, at strangers, and say, What is going on in your mind?

But in this world where there is a visceral, polarized reaction to just about everything,

anything that can show us how we might agree and disagree better is going to be asked to do so.

Even a party dress.

Blue and gray, definite, 100%.

White and gold.

You want to know what I would.

That's that's

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin, who produces Decodering with Katie Shepard.

This episode was edited by Andrew Adam Newman.

Derek John is Slate Senior Supervising Producer of Narrative Podcasts.

Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

You should check out David McRaney's book, How Minds Change.

As I said, it not only contains a chapter about the dress, there's also a bunch about another optical illusion Pascal Wallish created involving crocs and socks.

Also, we'll link to the optical illusion of the strawberries on our show page.

It was created by Professor Akiyoshi Kataoka.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

If you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

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So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

We'll be back next week, and we'll see you then.