‘The Dress’ mystery has been solved and it’s all to do with what time your alarm goes off, an expert claims
The optical illusion sent the internet into a frenzy in 2015, but a scientist claims he knows why people see it differently
BLUE and black or white and gold?
It's an age-old argument which has been dividing opinion since shopper Cecilia Bleasdale shared a photo of a £50 black and blue dress she was thinking of wearing to a wedding.
The photo sparked confusion, anger and fascination, because despite the dress definitely being blue and black, to many, it appeared gold and white.
But a new study sheds light on why the dress appears differently to different people - and it's all to do with what time we get up in the mornings.
New York University Professor Pascal Wallisch conducted a survey of 13,000 to try and work out the mystery, reports The Times.
He found that because the photo was taken in ambiguous light, people's brains made different assumptions about what colour it was - which he believes depends on whether they were a night owl or a morning lark.
Night owls - who get up late and stay up late - get less daylight exposure, so their brains believed it was in dim daylight and saw it as blue and black.
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But morning larks were more likely to think the dress was backlit and in shadow, and 80 per cent of the early risers in the survey saw it as white and gold.
Professor Wallisch said: "Because shadows are blue, and so your brain subtracts blue light from the image (making it look yellow).
He said: “If the brain faces uncertainty, in general it doesn’t say, ‘I don’t know’, it says, ‘I’ll fill in the uncertainty with assumptions’.
"The bottom line is, people made different assumptions.
“There are owls like me who get up very late and stay up very late, who get less daylight exposure.
"There are larks who see less artificial light.
"Everything else being equal, on average I’d predict larks to see it as gold, owls as blue.”
Since The Dress conundrum, a wave of optical illusions have taken the internet by storm.
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