Optical illusions that show how color can trick the eye

In the disputed image however, you have a bright background (so bright in fact that it causes glare on the lens over the right shoulder of the dress) supposedly making the dress appear lighter than it is. If anything I would say that the optical illusions offer evidence of why the dress would generally appear darker than it actually is than why it would appear lighter.

My problem with the "because science" isn't meant to be dismissive or imply that the principles that are argued aren't valid or plausible, my problem with "because science" is that a lot of the articles and videos made to describe the phenomena are titled something to the tune of "Science explains why people see different colors" and offer one of a varied set of plausible hypotheses, but they are explaining something without any controls.

I see it like being told you have cancer, asking the doctor "why?" and her saying "have you ever smoked cigarettes?" you saying yes, and her saying, "Well it's widely known and has been repeatedly proven that cigarettes are carcinogenic, there's your explanation."

In the same light, to me, saying the dress is interpreted differently because our brain plays tricks on us such as in optical illusions (which I don't refute at all) and that's why people are seeing it as different colors is completely unscientific to me because it doesn't have controls for things such as the type of screen people are viewing things from (glass vs matte), the color temperature of the screen (anyone running f.lux?), the viewing angle, auto-dimming screens based on ambient light, the effects of anti-glare material in some screens all of which may contribute to why not only different people see the image differently, but why the same people see the image differently based on different times/environments.

And given the amount of time and energy people have devoted to discussing this, I don't see why asking for evidence of one globally debated outlier example is comparable to redoing experiments that have been widely reproduced.

The thing is, I don't have a problem with people using previously proven concepts to expose potential explanations, I have a problem with people saying that one hypothesis "scientifically explains" a phenomena because it's a scientifically viable hypothesis.

--- On a side note, thanks for disagreeing with me via a reply instead of just arbitrarily down voting me because you don't like my opinion. I wish more people on here shared the views you expressed on your about blob.

I was looking for the the some of the articles and videos I saw that had pissed me off because their titles implied optical illusions explain this phenomena with science so I could explain that my "because science" comment wasn't meant to be dismissive or refute proven scientific theories but was based more on the fact that they were "proving" things with untested hypotheses with regard to this scenario, and as I started watching one of the videos, the dress appeared black and blue to me. And I realized I was watching the video on my phone vs the laptop I had previously used. Unlike my laptop, my phone's screen dims based on ambient light and lower levels were bringing out different hues in the image. My laptop also has auto color temperature adjustment based on the time of day which was affecting my perception.

Based on different screens I could see the exact same image side by side looking both black and blue and white and gold and realized there may be exogenous variables not included in the explanations that had previously upset me.

In my original comment to the article, I was reacting to the fact that people were trying to explain how why people were incorrectly interpreting the black and blue dress as white and gold because their mind is playing tricks on them based on optical illusions which generally work the opposite way.

Like you, I saw white and gold, I have been tested as having perfect color vision, know that fashion designers commonly rip styles off and given the contextual lighting, the image looked like it could have been of a knock-off in tiajuana and I didn't like that the only evidence that the dress is black and blue were the claims and evidence presented by a satirical musician submitting content on a blog representing another woman and a company with an identical dress who stands to profit quite a bit from this publicity this has generated and as honest Abe said, you can't believe everything on the internet.

But after seeing the image side by side looking differently on different screens, I am at peace with dressgate and think everyone is right about the two sets of colors seen, though I still think other explanations like solarization, the dress actually being white and gold but photographed to capture a blue hue, or screen discrepency should not be dismissed because optical illusions are a real thing and disagree with one hypothesis being advertised to summarily explain such a contentious phenomena because there is proven evidence to make that one idea plausible.

On another note, I'm wondering if people did comparisons on whether the size at which you viewed the robe had any effect on people's choice. Personally I can't see it as white because there are enough cues in the background that indicate that there isn't a strong blue light lighting the dress from the front. On the other hand if I shrink the image and squint, I can imagine it being a sort of backlit photo where the blue tint would just be a result of outdoor atmospheric diffusion and the contrast with yellow sunlight.