You can literally sample the rgb values and see it's blue and black

Edit: am I part of the joke here??? It's clearly blue and black...

I've always really liked this explanation image you can find on Wikipedia page for it. Essentially, people who see white and gold are mistaking the lighting to be cold and blue-tinted, rather than warm and yellow-tinted.

The portions inside the boxes are the exact same colors, you can easily check this with a color picker.

Stop trolling me. It's blue and black. I could never figure how people might perceive it otherwise.

Not even the brighter version looks white and gold to me. It's so obviously blue and black, y'all are insane.

No way, really ? I really thought it was always white and gold. This cannot be the same dress, I do not trust my eyes anymore

not used to decrypting overexposed pictures

I used to see it black and blue, now I see it white and gold.

+ I do photography and often have to work with overexposed pictures

Edit: just looked at it again now its black and blue. Wtf brain

overexposure is not the issue but improper white balance, the camera was probably set for ~6800K but the lighting in the room was ~2700K

This is exactly the thing.

Whatever the dress may be in reality, the photo of it that was circulated was either exposed or twiddled with such that the pixels it's made of are indeed slightly bluish grey trending towards white (i.e. above 50% grey) and tanish browny gold.

That is absolutely not up for debate. Those are the color values of those pixels, end of discussion.

Edit to add: This entire debacle is a fascinating case of people either failing to or refusing to separate the concept of a physical object versus its very inaccurate representation. The photograph of the object is not the object: ce n'est pas une robe.

The people going around in this thread and elsewhere putting people down and calling them "stupid" or whatever else only because they know that the physical dress itself is black and blue based on external information are studiously ignoring the fact that this is not what the photograph of it shows. That's because the photograph is extremely cooked and is not an accurate depiction. The debate only exists at all if one party or the other does not have the complete set of information, and at this point in history now that this stupid meme has been driven into the ground quite thoroughly I should hope that all of us do.

It's true that our brains can and will interpret false color data based on either context or surrounding contrast, and it's possible that somebody deliberately messed with the original image to amplify this effect in the first place. But the fact remains that arguing about what the dress is versus how it's been inaccurately depicted is stupid, and anyone still trying that at this late stage is probably doing so in bad faith.

I like Brainstorm vs Green Needle even better. The're not even the same amount of syllables! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1okD66RmktA

Crazy talk. White and gold only

It’s more about the colors around it. This image from Wikipedia does a really good job illustrating the effect.

Context is extremely important in identifying color. As Technology Connections tells us, for example, “brown is just orange with context.”

The actual dress was in fact blue and black.