What really is the color GREEN? What does it mean to different people? We actually have no idea. Now, consider The Dress on its 10 year anniversary. One can either argue with others whether it is BLUE and BLACK or WHITE and GOLD, or objectively look at it’s composition from a technical standpoint. Below is a cross-section of the dress image using the online image-picker application showing a palette from selected pixels in the image
Left to right, the RGB values of 8 selected colors from the palette are
- #68605B
- #4A4139
- #7385B4
- #837779
- #8897C2
- #666993
- #6D79A0
- #676266
From an online color matcher using the names in the Unix RGB.txt table.
- gray38
(97 97 97) (#616161) - gray26
(66 66 66) (#424242) - LightSlateGray
(119 136 153) (#778899) - gray49
(125 125 125) (#7d7d7d) - LightSkyBlue3
(141 182 205) (#8db6cd) - LightSkyBlue4
(96 123 139) (#607b8b) - SlateGray
(112 128 144) (#708090) - gray40
(102 102 102) (#666666)
The matches make sense qualitatively since a gray is essentially a color that have somewhat equivalent R, G, and B values, with black at one end R=G=B=’00’ and white at the other end R=G=B=’FF’. Entries 1,2, 4, 8 would all be guessed to be gray looking at the RGB values. So that entry 2 is the darkest gray (closest to black) and entry 4 is the lightest gray (closest to white).
For blues, the predominant RGB value is obviously if the B value is highest, so that includes the other entries 3,5,6,7. Both 5 and 6 have “blue” in their name and the other two have “slate”, which is often considered having a grayish-blue appearance.
So the grouping would be the following
With the first set obviously being shades of gray approaching black, and the second featuring bluish tinges.
So where does the gold come from in many people’s perception? (This is not in question as early on a majority of the people thought it white and gold). According to color tables, gold has a lower blue content than red or green, with pure gold having zero
If look at the rest of the dress, the only part that has a reduced B content is the upper part, which is perhaps more exposed to light.
The highlighted area is RGB=#807045 which is close “lightgoldenrod4” color RGB=#8b814c, which is a darker shade of the LemonChiffon or light PaleGoldenRod that appears in the background at the lower right.
According to Wikipedia sourcing, “The dress was confirmed as a royal blue “Lace Bodycon Dress” from the retailer Roman Originals.[24] [25] The dress is black and blue“.
This hints at the optical illusion quality of the image. The thinking is that people were assuming that shadows were adding blues and so they mentally reduced the blue content resulting in more gold or yellowish hues, according to this article in Slate (subliminal context warning). Or consider this explanation:
How do you explain The Dress? “I believe that some people see the dress as its own frame of reference, ignoring the bright background seen to the right. Within the boundaries of the dress itself, the highest luminance is anchored at white, leaving the darker color as gold. Other people seem to see the dress within a framework that includes the brighter and more yellowish background, visible to the right of the dress. For those people, the white anchor is the bright region itself. Relative to this anchor, the “white” part of the dress is no longer the highest luminance, and it is seen as bluer than the background. Likewise the gold is changed into black.”
This leads to the possibility that some people tend to be purely objective, seeing things for what they are, yet that many others are inclined to be manipulated or at least influenced by context, showing unwarranted confidence in their perhaps subliminally-acquired assumptions.. This may also have implications for AI large language models, which is predominantly derived from the context of a prompt and all the background information acquired based on that prompt. One always has to be aware of context and what “to assume” implies