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The internet is losing its composure over this dress that might be white and gold or black and blue

Feb 27, 2015, 07:24 IST

There is a dress that might be black and blue or white and gold. 

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It started on this Tumblr page here, where a user posted this dress with the caption, "guys please help me - is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the f**k out"

Here's the dress.

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And people on Twitter are completely freaking out whether this dress is blue and black or white and gold. (Note: some of the embedded tweets contain NSFW language.)

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Mindy Kaling has also chimed in.

And BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith. And New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac.And of course, Denny's.Naturally, the debate surrounding the dress includes the Illuminati.And the llamas that were loose in Arizona earlier today.  And amid all this, there might be an explanation here. Here's what the text in that embedded tweet says:"Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There's rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part. The "cones" see color. The "rods" see shade, like black, white and grey. Cones only work when enough light passes through. So while I see the fabric as white, someone else may see it as blue because my cones aren't responding to the dim lighting. My rods see it as a shade (white).There's three cones: small, medium and large. They are blue sensitive, green sensitive, and red sensitive.As for the black bit (which I see as gold), it's called additive mixing. Blue, green and red are the main colors for additive mixing. This is where it gets really tricky. Subtractive mixing, such as with paint, means the more colors you add the murkier it gets until its black. ADDITIVE mixing, when you add the three colors the eyes see best, red, green and blue, (not to be confused with primary colors red, blue and yellow) it makes pure white.-Blue and Black: In conclusion, your retina's cones are more high functioning, and this results in your eyes doing subtractive mixing.-White and Gold: our eyes don't work well in dim light so our retinas rods see white, and this makes them less light sensitive, causing additive mixing, (that of green and red), to make gold."And this user says he turned his phone's brightness from low to high and saw the colors switching. So give that a shot, maybe.

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