Children screaming. Babies crying. Families crumbling. Relationships being torn apart. People running rampant, frantically searching for answers to a question that only leads to dead ends. Tensions rising. Blood boiling. The ground shakes beneath our feet.
No, this revolting schism isn’t the coming of the apocalypse. It’s something much worse.
You guessed it–the existential crisis known as the dress that broke the Internet.
By now you’ve probably scoured countless amounts of Buzzfeed articles and invested an absurdly amount of time attempting to answer the impossible question–what color is that dress? Despite zooming in and zooming out, changing the brightness settings on your phone screen, and perhaps questioning the validity of your retinas, it seems that no one can get a consensus on what color this dress truly is. Regardless of whether you’re Team White and Gold or Team Blue and Black, it’s still pretty insane to think that one dress in bad lighting could cause such a stir (well, more than a stir, more like a forceful churn). But what is it that makes different people perceive the colors of an object so opposingly?
The answer comes from Dr. Julia Haller, the opthalmologist-in-chief at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. According to an article from CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen, the differing perceptions are due to the cones in our retinas. These cones detect blue, red, and green in images, then collaborate with our brains to determine other colors. Although we usually perceive colors in the same way, it turns out that blue/yellow is a typical color confusion that may be leading to this dilemma. Haller says that the picture of the dress seems to have tints that are in the “gray area,” thus leading to a whole lot of confusion. Other medical experts have varying explanations for it, mostly surrounding the amount of illumination being perceived or differences in our brain’s processing of information.
But now for the answer we’ve REALLY been waiting for–what is the actual color of the dress?
Well, according to Buzzfeed, who contacted Caitlin McNeill (the girl who posted the dress’ photo), the dress is indeed blue and black (much to my disappointment, I was very much aligned with Team White and Gold). This is the dress below in its true colors:
(sigh)
Were you #TeamBlueandBlack or #TeamWhiteandGold?