The dress – blue and black, or white and gold – has divided people across the internet. Emerging via Tumblr and then Twitter and now the old halls of Facebook, it's only a matter before luddites like your parents weigh in on it.
Why is it causing such a ruckus? Simply because we believe everything we see. Our eyesight is such a huge informer for us that we think everything it tells us is spot on. Now, while we all might see the same thing when we look at the dress (we all see a dress when we look at the dress) our reading on the dress tells us that colours form across a spectrum and some of us have different definitions of the colours on the spectrum. Plus, the involvement of other colours nearby throws us, according to this hi-tech article from Wired.
Short story; we see things differently. Long story? If some of us can’t even agree on the colours of a dress that doesn’t even look that pretty anyway, what else are we seeing differently to our peers? It sounds like we’re stoned at work; honestly, we’re not.
What we are, however, is dumbstruck at who falls on different sides of the debate. Black and blues include Justin Bieber, James Franco and Taylor Swift, white and golds include Julianne Moore, Cheryl Cole, Vanessa from The Saturdays. As for Kim Kardashian and Kanye West? They’re split, with Kim being team #whiteandgold and Kanye being team #blackandblue. And Team Debrief? We’ve had some #whiteandgold defectors, and some #blackandblue stalwarts.
Roman Original, the company which makes the dress has said that it is definitely black and blue in real life, told Mashable: ‘We are thinking about making a gold and white version. We already do it in other colours. We could do it quickly, but it has to go through quality assurance.’
Ha. So us black and blues win. But if you're still wondering how we all became obsessed with a dress that no-one was even wearing, why the internet is so obsessed with a silly dress, here’s a theory.
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First off, everyone who can see can see the dress. It’s not like the ‘can you roll your tongue’ thing because those who can’t roll their tongue just shrug and go ‘well, I can’t do it’ and have no need to shout about it. Whereas, everyone who can see the dress can see a colour on it. There’s a definite outcome from the question ‘what colour is the dress?’ in a way there isn’t for the equivalent ‘can you roll your tongue?’
Beyond that, we exist on the internet, where everything is personalised and tailored to us. We’re all individuals and difference is encouraged; one person can have 15 identities, 1500 alliegances and 15,000 opinions. Social media encourages us to spurt those opinions out, to draw our lines in the sand. And as we trail along the desert with our sticks plunged into the ground, someone else might trail shoulder-to-shoulder with us.
And we might think ‘Hey, this person is cool, they’re on our side, they’re with us on this!’ but then, with just one tweet, that’s it, they’re off and away. Whether they’re saying something slightly strange, like hating tomatoes in sandwiches, so their stick trails a few feet away, or they’re going all pro-UKIP and are now on the other side of a dune to us, our lines in the sand go in all sorts of directions, crissing, crossing and then wildly flinging away from another.
READ MORE: What Colour Is This Dress? Nobody Can Decide And Social Media Is Broken
With the dress, though? Unless you’re that tiny minority who’s so open-minded that you’ve seen both sets of colours on the dress, there’s one line or the other. And the line is deep and thick and in concrete this time. We agree or disagree based on something so innate as sight that we can’t really hate another for disagreeing with us, no-one is hurt in the disagreement, either. And though lace bodycon isn’t exactly our bag, there’s something kind of comforting about a simple yes/no in a world of everythings.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.