The Voynich Ninja

Back in 2015, there was a viral picture of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which divided viewers on its supposed colors: was it blue and black, or white and gold?



The confusion is explained by our expectation. Do we expect warm lighting or bright outdoor light? 

Well, somehow this manuscript dress reminded me of it. And indeed, it's got all four colors. (If we may count "dirty dark gold" as black).


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You're clearly mistaken. That dress in the MS is without a doubt white and gold, not black and blue -- no, wait ...

(22-09-2026, 11:56 PM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You're clearly mistaken. That dress in the MS is without a doubt white and gold, not black and blue -- no, wait ...

It's blue and gold!

Interestingly, the viral sensation dress is blue and black, while I assume the manuscript dress is white and gold.

I never understood how anyone could see the dress in the picture as white and gold, but apparently this depends on one's experience with store lighting and all that.

The original picture had light blue and dark gold in it. 

(23-09-2026, 12:07 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I never understood how anyone could see the dress in the picture as white and gold, (...)

Try fatiguing your cone cells by staring at some blue background first, see if you can see some "chimerical" white/gold that way

(23-09-2026, 12:07 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I never understood how anyone could see the dress in the picture as white and gold

Objectively, the color of something depends on the spectrum of the light that scatters off it; but that depends on the spectrum of the light that falls on it.  

Our eye+brain has evolved the capacity to do automatic "white balancing":  it estimates the color of the illumination by considering the whole scene, and uses that estimate to mentally adjust the perceived colors of objects in it.  This ability allows us to distinguish a ripe banana from a green one under broad daylight, under the reddish light of sunset, or under the greenish light on a forest floor.

In that image, many people will subconsciously estimate the color of the illumination in that scene from the outdoors background, which on that image is mostly RGB white (#ffffff).  But the light falling on the dress seems to come from interior lighting, possibly fluorescent lamps, possibly scattered in part by blue walls.  Thus, by comparison with the background, the light stripes of the dress are objectively light blue, and are perceived that way.  And the dark stripes are perceived as grayish brown.

But many other people will instead subconsciously use the light stripes of the dress to estimate the color of the light falling on it, instinctively assuming that they are white.  Then of course the light stripes are perceived as white, and the stripes as a more yellowish color, like gold.

(The outdoors background on the image is actually overexposed, so it is possible that the camera itself had applied some bogus white balance adjustment, automatically; which resulted in the dress colors being shifted to blue.)

All the best, --stolfi