If you've not heard of The Dress meme yet you'll likely start seeing it in one of your social feeds soon. The Dress is proving to be one of the most popular memes yet after the item was posted on a Tumblr feed. It's already hitting over 25 million visitors since going live yesterday, according to BuzzFeed.
Essentially the post was a simple photo of a dress which some people see as black and blue while some see as white and gold. Pretty insignificant and yet at one point BuzzFeed said it accounted for over half of the site's entire traffic. At one point more than 670,000 people were on the site at the same time, it claims.
So why are people seeing different colours? According to Cedar Riener, associate professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College, it's about the brain's interpretation of how much light is coming off the dress. Some see more light on a less reflective black and blue dress while some are seeing less light on a more reflective white and gold number. It's a very similar effect to that shown in the Adelson checkerboard optical illusion. In the image below, square A is exactly the same shade as square B, but they look totally different.
The Dress has gone so viral that celebrities are getting involved with the likes of Taylor Swift, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Bieber, Julianne Moore, Ellen and more tweeting about it.
Buzzfeed has carried out a poll which currently has 73 per cent of people seeing white and gold with 27 per cent seeing black and blue.
Even in Pocket-lint towers we’re getting a mix of responses on colours. Which do you see?
READ: Imgur launches MemeGen app for iOS to quickly create a meme