So Really, What is the Color of this Dress?

The world was taken aback and divided by a mere dress color for the past couple of days.

Seriously, what color is this dress? Some see white and gold, others blue and black and others something else. Tens of millions of people have now shared their opinion online, generating one of the biggest social media conversations in recent memory.

In a report by BBC, the core scientific question is: why do people see the dress in different colors? Beau Lotto, a professor of neuroscience at University College London, says "the brain has evolved not to see absolutes, but to see the difference between things." Because colors that appear in sunlight look different from those that appear under streetlights, for example, our brains have to focus on the relationship between colors, not the colors themselves. Lotto says we can "only speculate" about why some people see blue where others see white. It could be because some are focusing on the difference between the colors of the dress itself, some are looking at the difference between the dress and the background, and others are taking the color of their computer monitor, and the room around it into account.

That's some of the science, but it doesn't quite answer why the picture went viral at such a terrific speed. That story began just before a wedding held last weekend in the Hebrides, a group of islands just out of Scotland, when the mother of the bride sent a picture to her daughter asking what she thought of the dress. The bride and groom both looked at the picture and each saw the image differently. They posted the image to Facebook, asking their friends to help settle the argument. One of them, Caitlin McNeill - also part of the wedding band - reposted the image to her Tumblr blog at around 8pm on Thursday evening. "Guys please help me - is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree," she wrote. The post saw a flurry of activity, but she couldn't have predicted the scale of the ensuing debate.

Around three hours later someone at Buzzfeed picked up on the blog, reposting the picture and a snippet of the conversation, along with a poll asking readers what colors they saw. The article set the internet alight, and has now been viewed more than 24 million times.

The dramatic spike in conversation only took place in the wake of the Buzzfeed article. Its popularity on that site prompted a string of copycat articles on the news sites belonging to more established, as media outlets bid to exploit the huge spike in web traffic.

The dress is a classical optical illusion, and that's why people love it.