The above photograph is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Cecilia Bleasdale.
Is it black and blue, or white and gold?
This question, about the color of a dress, is unifying the internet in debate. On every platform available – blogging sites, comment threads and social media – users are asking what others see and marveling at the answers.
The question, and subsequent riffs, appears to have started on Tumblr. By Thursday evening, it had been picked up by Buzzfeed, where 25 million people have seen the resulting article.
By Friday, four of Twitter’s top trends were related to the controversy: #TheDress, #whiteandgold, #blackandblue and (skipping to fifth) #dressgate. On Friday morning, #thedress was top in Facebook’s trending box, and people had commented an untold number of times on the question.
“At one point tonight (ET) more than 670,000 people were on BuzzFeed.com, half of whom were viewing ‘the dress’ post,” tweeted Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith.
Someone registered all of these domain names tonight: pic.twitter.com/O0NJzToJu9
— Noah Veltman (@veltman) February 27, 2015
CNBC, Time, Wired and Syracuse.com are among the many outlets, international and local, general readership and special interest, that have staked a claim on the controversy. Some purport to answer the perplexing question, or weigh in on some other facet of the saga.
Jokes also abounded, some playing off other internet fascinations such as the two llamas which were briefly on the loose in Sun City, Arizona on Thursday afternoon.
#whiteandgold or #blackandblue? We found a way around science- you can have both! #TheDress #dressgate pic.twitter.com/5oj3ZTqOWk
— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) February 27, 2015
#thedress 'Definitely blue'.. pic.twitter.com/MkZ01cjDFN
— Tate (@Tate) February 27, 2015
Neuroscientists and color perception researchers weighed in, though the takeaway seems to be that no one is sure why this is happening.
As of Friday morning, more than 2.2 million people had answered Buzzfeed’s quiz on the subject. To provide a partial answer to the question, a little less than one-third of respondents saw the dress as blue and black, and the rest white and gold.
