Thread: The Dress Of Many Colors--What Do YOU See? Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
So...on Thursday, a woman ("Swiked") asked for help on Tumblr, and posted a picture of a dress. She and her friends couldn't agree on the colors.

The whole thing's gone viral, sparking all sorts of articles--because there's a big difference in how lots of other people see the dress, too.

Here's the synopsis article, from Yahoo:

"Is This Dress Blue And Black Or White And Gold? Here's What The Experts Say."

How do you see it?

[ 28. February 2015, 09:38: Message edited by: Golden Key ]
 
Posted by Wesley J (# 6075) on :
 
Blue and gold.
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
white and gold--and, on TV Thurs. night, it seemed like there might be a bit of light blue edging.
 
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
Blue and black. On closer inspection, the black is dark gold.
 
Posted by Wesley J (# 6075) on :
 
The BBC has a short video on it.

Certainly an interesting occurrence. Seems it depends on the background and the lighting. Hmm...
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
There's also a blog article about it at the site for the "Science Friday" radio show.

The article in the OP also has links to several related articles--conference of eye docs, etc.
 
Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :
 
White and gold.
 
Posted by Mili (# 3254) on :
 
I saw it as white and gold first, but later on seeing the picture again it looked blue and black (or very dark gold and blue). Not I never know which combination I will see and once or twice it's changed while I'm looking at it.
 
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 
I can only see white and gold, however hard I try.

But the actual dress is blue and black. Here it is.

People in our staff room who could only see one combination thought the others were winding them up saying they could only see the other. Not many could see both and switch between the two.
 
Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :
 
So cameras do lie after all. And now for other late breaking news . . . . [Snore]
 
Posted by Wesley J (# 6075) on :
 
[Big Grin]
 
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
So cameras do lie after all. And now for other late breaking news . . . . [Snore]
Nope.

It's not about the camera at all. It's about how we perceive colour and how the background lighting changes this differently for different people.
 
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :
 
Blue and dark gold. The blue is paler though than it's actual colour.
 
Posted by Heavenly Anarchist (# 13313) on :
 
white and gold, though I can see pale blue when viewed on my husband's iphone.
 
Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
Blue (which is the colour of Tuesdays, as enny fule kno) and black.

Ian J.
 
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :
 
Have seen a number of pics and some footage. Some show gold, some show blue. Have still not seen dress. When I do so, I'll be back.
 
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :
 
I see that "colour" is a social construct.

("Colour blind" artist here. [Biased] )
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
Initially saw it on my laptop as blue and black and then on my tablet as white and gold and realised that the difference was the room light was on in the first and off in the second. So I turned the light on and the image switched to blue and black. Turned the light back off and I could make my perception of the image shift though both of those and blue and gold
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
White and gold, although if try to screen out the context I can see that the white is a blue.
 
Posted by Twilight (# 2832) on :
 
Blue and dark gold.
 
Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
Blue & black, & can't seem to "get" white & gold from it however I try.
 
Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
So cameras do lie after all. And now for other late breaking news . . . . [Snore]
Not in this case. People do not see coulors the same way. So when you describe a lawn as green there is no way of telling if another person who describes it as green sees the same colour as you do.

In the case of the picture both are correct. The dress is blue and black. But if you look at an analysis of a pixel from the picture it is gold and very pale orange. Some people compensate for the orange lighting and see blue and black, some don't and see white and gold. If you see pale blue you are compensating for the lighting but not enough.
 
Posted by M. (# 3291) on :
 
I saw it as white and gold on my i-pad; then saw it on tv and saw it as grey and blue.

M.

[ 28. February 2015, 13:46: Message edited by: M. ]
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
White and gold. I can see that the white is actually blue in the pixel sense, but I think my brain is compensating for the fact that it's backlit and therefore looks darker than it really is. I think those of us who see it as white and gold are doing this.

I can't see the black at all, nor how lighting can change black to the brownish-orange in the picture.

Interestingly my students (7th and 8th graders) came in yesterday at first period all talking about nothing else. "It's blue and black!" "It's white and gold!" When the bell rang and class began, I invited them to a brief discussion, and we voted. It was about 50% blue and black, 25% white and gold, and 25% undecided.

Then they took the math test.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
It's lilac and brown. The brown could at a pinch be gold I suppose. I don't know why anyone could think the rest was white and the "black" has been lost.

I floated this on Facebook yesterday and a friend said she thought it was pink and gold. It really depends on how your monitor is calibrated, and also on the white balance of the original photo.

[ 28. February 2015, 14:25: Message edited by: Ariel ]
 
Posted by Sparrow (# 2458) on :
 
I can only see it as blue and black.
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
My brain immediately translated this as white and gold. Interestingly, I think this is because I got used to the 90's trend in film making of using that darkness- generated blue for various mood effects. ( see: "Smilla's sense of snow.", for instance.)
 
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
How long do we have to stare at this dress before the Martians control our brains?
 
Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
It's not about the camera at all. It's about how we perceive colour.
Miss Amanda hates to be the one to tell you, but we're looking at a photograph, not the actual object.
 
Posted by Drifting Star (# 12799) on :
 
I saw it first on the BBC website, and it was unquestionably white and gold. I discovered, however, that if I focussed on a bit of white space below the picture, what I could see out of the corner of my eye was very clearly blue and black.

When I returned to the same picture later and looked at it directly it was blue and black - I assume the lighting had changed in some way, but there was no artificial lighting either time, and I was sitting in the same place using the same laptop.

I would love to know why this particular dress is causing such a difference in perception. I've never heard of this happening before, so it is presumably not common. Is it something about the specific colours, or the combination of the two colours?
 
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
quote:
Amanda B. Reckondwythe: Miss Amanda hates to be the one to tell you, but we're looking at a photograph, not the actual object.
The issue here isn't that cameras lie, it's that they lie differently to different people. They have already experimented with different monitor settings etc. on this photo, and the outcome is the same: some people see black and blue, others see white and gold.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
Either way, it's 'orrible and I wouldn't wear it.
 
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
It's not about the camera at all. It's about how we perceive colour.
Miss Amanda hates to be the one to tell you, but we're looking at a photograph, not the actual object.
It doesn't matter - people are perceiving the colours differently. This is what's causing the stir, not the photo itself, but our colour perceptions.

It is a huge stir too - worldwide.


Here is the story. It must be strange to be part of such a huge phenomenon when all you were doing is sharing a photo of a mother of the bride dress.
 
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :
 
This is all interesting. The first version I saw on TV (old style monitor), I saw white (or shadowed pale blue) and dark gold. I saw it the same way on a flat screen TV. Now, seeing it from GK's link here on my computer monitor it looks medium blue and black. I was definitely interested in a pixel analysis (thanks, Balaam!), but I still don't really get how the eyes and brain of different people observing the same image from the same source and from the same monitor can redefine saturated blue as pale blue and black as gold. First thought when they were talking about it on morning TV was that the image did indeed look pale colored and gold because of surface reflection on the dress itself. But the news people in the studio were looking at each other in disbelief because they, looking at the image from the same equipment, were coming to opposite opinions.

Well, the dress company is very happy because the dress sales have gone through the roof! [Cool]
 
Posted by Oscar the Grouch (# 1916) on :
 
I saw (and still see) white and gold. Mrs Grouch sees blue and black and cannot conceive how I can see anything different.

Ain't life weird?
 
Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on :
 
After a while, I was able to see it either way, which is a very interesting thing to experience.
 
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:

It's not about the camera at all. It's about how we perceive colour and how the background lighting changes this differently for different people.
And it's about the camera. Most people's eyes have three kinds of cones, that are more-or-less sensitive to reds, greens and blues. Most digital cameras have an RGB Bayer mask, producing pixels that are more-or-less sensitive to reds, greens, and blues.

But the spectra are not the same. Compare the spectral sensitivities shown here for the eyes and the camera. Notice that they are quite different.

Now, your sensing device takes the triplet of values (which looks like the integral of the product of these sensitivity curves and the emission spectrum of whatever object you're looking at) and converts that to a "colour response". In the case of the eye, this is your perception of colour. In the case of the camera, it maps its perception of colour onto (usually) a particular RGB colour space. When you subsequently look at the picture, you're not looking at the dress, you're looking at a camera-processed version of the dress, that has then been processed by the computer monitor. There's plenty of scope for introducing "error" here via choice of white balance and so on, which is entirely to do with the response of the camera and its post-processing and not to do with the eye.

Then there's colour metamerism. A whole range of different optical spectra will appear the same to a particular sensing device (eye, camera etc.) because that device converts the entirety of the spectral information to three numbers. The spectrum of light reflected from a particular object (in this case, the dress) is the product of the spectrum of incident light and the reflectivity spectrum of the dress. Things that look the same colour under one light can look different colours under another light. This is because they're not the same colour - they're metamers.

The third part of the confusion is the one that you indicate - that there is variation between the colour response of different people's eyes, and there is variation in the processing in the brain that turns that into a perceived colour. Your personal perception of colour is part of the story (and it's how different people can look at the same screen / paper and see different things) but it's not the whole story here.

Everybody who looks at the physical dress has seen it as blue and black.
 
Posted by Jack the Lass (# 3415) on :
 
My experience is the same as mousethief's. I can only see white and gold, although I can see a bluish tinge on the white which is presumably down to the camera not being able to handle the poor light. I can't see blue and black at all in that photo.
 
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :
 
This discussion reminds me somewhat of the spinning dancer illusion. In this illusion, by representing the dancer as a silhouette, the designer has removed any information that distinguishes between the two possible directions of rotation. So the aggressive pattern-matching tool between your ears is left to extrapolate some real 3-D motion. Some people always see one direction, others see the dancer flip directions, some can make her flip at will.

Nobody, or everybody is wrong [Smile]

There would be no confusion if someone was watching an actual physical dancer spinning, but you're not - you're watching an ambiguous 2-D projection. There is no correct answer.
 
Posted by Drifting Star (# 12799) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Drifting Star:
I saw it first on the BBC website, and it was unquestionably white and gold...

When I returned to the same picture later ... it was blue and black - I assume the lighting had changed in some way, but there was no artificial lighting either time, and I was sitting in the same place using the same laptop.
Well I've found the reason for this! I can take the colours all the way from clear white and gold to clear blue and black by starting with the screen tilted towards me by about 10 degrees from the vertical, and moving it away from me to a similar distance from the vertical.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
This is crazy. I've downloaded the photo, called it up in Photoshop and sampled the two colours. The closest equivalents are Pantone 652C and Pantone 7531. That's blue and brown.
 
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Oscar the Grouch:
I saw (and still see) white and gold. Mrs Grouch sees blue and black and cannot conceive how I can see anything different.

Ain't life weird?
And that's the thing - the incredulity that someone else sees something totally differently.

(We should know that by now here on the Ship [Biased] )
 
Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :
 
I can understand the explanation, but one thing puzzles me - why this dress? I have a jumper which is primarily blue with black horizontal stripes and there are no photos of me wearing it in which anyone would see anything other than blue and black.

Blue and black isn't an unusual colour combination; why haven't photographs of other blue and black dresses previously revealed this? Could I set up a photo of me in my jumper with the lighting adjusted so that some people see it as a white and gold jumper?
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
I think the texture of the fabric might have something to do with how the camera picked up the lighting,
 
Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :
 
It is also the way the photo is adjusted. It is deliberately overexposed and there are one or two other adjustments on the go so that it hits precisely that part of our eyesight where there is most difference.

Jengie
 
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :
 
I interpreted it as white and gold, with the colour distortion coming from using the wrong exposure settings on the camera. I am reading the blue tinge as coming from using fluorescent lighting settings in natural light. (I've seen too many photos that have done that). But the reverse would also work, so it's a blue and black dress in a photograph that has been taken using the wrong settings inside.
 
Posted by Jolly Jape (# 3296) on :
 
The trick is in the lighting. The foreground (that is, the woman) is lit in something similar tonorth light, maybe an hmi, whilst the background is lit in tungsten. Thus, everything in the foreground appears blue (including the woman's flesh tones: note the unnatural colour of her skin, whilst the background is a sort of overexposed yellow, typical of incandescent lighting. I'd light to bet there's a bit of flouro, led , or some other spectrally spikey light there, too. If you adjust your colour vision for the flesh tones, the dress is white, if for the background, blue.
 
Posted by Jolly Jape (# 3296) on :
 
In other words, what CK said.
 
Posted by moonlitdoor (# 11707) on :
 
I have a question for the people who see white. In the version of the picture linked to at the start of this discussion, there is some writing over the dress, and the word 'or' appears in white over the lighter of the dress colours.

I see a strong contrast between the colour of the writing and that of the dress. Do those who see the dress as white not see much of a contrast ?
 
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :
 
Yes, I see that contrast. I know that I am seeing a shade of blue, but that I'm interpreting it as white with an added blue tinge from camera exposure settings for fluorescent lighting. What the camera does to compensate on the white balance under fluorescent lighting, which casts a yellow hue, is compensate by adding blue.
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
I see a definite contrast, but my brain still wants to interpret the lighter color in the dress photo as a shadow.

Something like white text laid over an image like this.

[ 28. February 2015, 19:06: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
 
Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :
 
I see dark periwinkle blue and charcoal gray.
This is so interesting!
 
Posted by moonlitdoor (# 11707) on :
 
That image you linked to is quite interesting Kelly Alves. If you asked me what colour the snow in the foreground of that picture is, I would say that it is grayish blue. Although snow looks white in normal light, my brain does not think 'it's snow so it must be white'.
 
Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :
 
To Monet snow was almost anything but white.
 
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :
 
When you paint colours are interesting - shadows aren't black, but take on the colours that surround them or contrast them. Same with snow, which reflects all the colours around, including the sky. Trying to paint to make colours that look right you have to do a lot of juggling because we interpret a lot.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
That was why I got the pantones for this dress (on the previous page of this thread) which are clearly blue and brown. There is a subconscious expectation that clouds are white etc, but if you take a photo and sample the colours you will pretty quickly see that they are not.

The dress company are now bringing out a design in white and gold, by the way.
 
Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :
 
In that photo I saw blue, black and dark gold/light brown. However, just to confuse things I have seen another photo of the dress where it looked white and gold and yet another where it looked dark blue and black.

I suggest we name this colour Chameleon.
 
Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :
 
For those who want a spoiler there is this explanation on the BBC. Sorry if that is not available internationally.

Jengie
 
Posted by Stumbling Pilgrim (# 7637) on :
 
Ooh, something really odd just happened. I've been seeing this photograph throughout as white and gold (with a bluish tint to the white which my brain interpreted as a lighting effect), and even when I tried to tell my brain to see blue and black it refused. When I looked at the whole of the second picture in the link in the OP, I saw white and gold as usual. But when I scrolled down to read the text so I could only see the bottom half of the picture, I distinctly saw, for the first time, blue and black, though not as intense a blue as the dress actually is. If I scroll up and down now I can see the colours change, but strangely, if I can only see the top half I still see white and gold.
 
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
For those who want a spoiler there is this explanation on the BBC.
And, of course, here's the xkcd.
 
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by balaam:
To Monet snow was almost anything but white.
Same for Joseph Farquharson.
 
Posted by Jonah the Whale (# 1244) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
When you paint colours are interesting - shadows aren't black, but take on the colours that surround them or contrast them. Same with snow, which reflects all the colours around, including the sky. Trying to paint to make colours that look right you have to do a lot of juggling because we interpret a lot.
I think the shadow thing is interesting. I notice when you project black text onto a white wall your eyes really see the text as black. In fact the wall is still the same colour as it was, but the surrounding part of the rectangle has become a brighter white. There is clearly no way you can genuinely project a "black" image using white light.
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
I randomly walked into a local bar to get away from the rain today,a nd some dude came rushing up to a table full of girls with his Iphone extended, shouting "WHAT COLOR IS THE DRESS??!!"

I officially went loopy at that point. I have had it with the dress. What the hell is in store for the future when the major tipping point for 2015 is some damn dress? I fear it is only a portent of further madness to come.
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
Having said all that:
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:


The dress company are now bringing out a design in white and gold, by the way.
Shiny!
[Cool]
 
Posted by Mamacita (# 3659) on :
 
Yesterday I worked as a substitute teacher in a small school as a favor to a friend. And all the students from about 5th grade up were talking about that damned dress. I was grateful that I had already seen it on FB so I could have a little credibility. Also, I was able to effectively jump on a trio of 6th-grade boys at the back of the classroom, when I overheard one of them say "white and gold!" when they were supposed to be doing homework on their computers.
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
Did you give them a demerit for the day for being, like, WRONG? [Big Grin]
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
My kids came into first period on Friday fiercely debating the color of the dress. I let them talk about it for a while, and we took a straw poll. It was about 50% blue and black, 25% white and gold, and 25% undecided. I was not expecting this to be how we started the period! By second period apparently they had all hashed it out in their first period classes, so there was no discussion of it.
 
Posted by Wesley J (# 6075) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
For those who want a spoiler there is this explanation on the BBC. Sorry if that is not available internationally.

Jengie
The link was posted here ten hours earlier. Same old, same old.

Are we still talking about that dress? I don't believe it! [Help] [Two face]
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:


But the actual dress is blue and black. Here it is.

Boy, it didn't take the Amazon.com peanut gallery long to ransack those reviews, did it?
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
To me, the Amazon example and some others I've seen simply look like a white and gold dress in a bluish shadow. Same with the snow photo to which someone linked: white snow under a blue shadow.

The OP link has a copy of the original photo of the dress--evidently, an actual printed photo (ISTM), and not the cell phone pic that was originally posted to tumblr. (It's about halfway down, past the point where you have to click "Read More".) The dress (on the MiL, on the left) looks like a solid dark color to me--possibly more dark blue than black.

WIRED magazine has a good article.

Scientific America has an article, too. Personally, I prefer the WIRED article, and SciAm makes reference to it. But SciAm also has a pic showing that, when you view the dress at the vendor's site and use the magnifier there, *the magnified part of the dress looks white and gold*.

YMMV.

[ 01. March 2015, 06:55: Message edited by: Golden Key ]
 
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :
 
In the end, the only answer to "What colour is this?" is "What colour do you see?"

Colour blind people know that objectivity is an illusion.
 
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
In the end, the only answer to "What colour is this?" is "What colour do you see?"

Colour blind people know that objectivity is an illusion.
A colour blind person with a spectrophotometer will measure exactly the same spectrum as an ordinarily sighted person.
 
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
In the end, the only answer to "What colour is this?" is "What colour do you see?"

Colour blind people know that objectivity is an illusion.
A colour blind person with a spectrophotometer will measure exactly the same spectrum as an ordinarily sighted person.
Fair point, but I don't think I know any artists who would be interested in such an exercise. In fact, I think I hear Cézanne turning in his grave.
 
Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :
 
Yes but perception is not just about what impacts our eyes it is also about the words were have to describe colour. I came across this article in the wake of the dress story. I wonder how many here can tell the difference between the greens in the fourth picture down.

Jengie
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
jj--

I can't see the difference.

Thanks for that great article!
 
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Yes but perception is not just about what impacts our eyes it is also about the words were have to describe colour.
So I was discussing that article with some friends, and it seems to me that it's really not about what words we use. In the article, the members of the tribe-that-doesn't-understand-blue are unable to distinguish between a blue square and a green one. That's not a difference in language, it's a difference in perception.

Assuming that the tribal members have the same number of short (blue-sensitive) cones as most other people, we're not talking about a physical insensitivity to blue.

But the signals from the rods and cones in the eye are mapped to perceived colour by the brain. I could imagine that if you never saw blue, your brain might be trained to see the short cone as another brightness signal, like the rods, and so your perceptual colour space was quite different from most people's.

And naturally, if you couldn't see blue as being a different colour from green, you wouldn't need to develop a word for it. So I think the language we use is a consequence of the perception we have, and not vice versa.


(I'm no kind of expert here - I'm expecting IngoB to show up and put me right any moment.)
 
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :
 
Jengie, bizarre! I got it right! [Yipee]

I think the article is a bit muddled, though. The ancient Hebrews did have a blue dye (distinct from purple) and this was considered holy. There's been a big foofaraw the past few years as they think they've finally identified the right historic color (=coming from the right organic source, a snail) for use in prayer shawls, etc. And of course there was a word for it, though I'll not inflict my haphazard memory on y'all here.

Vietnamese has one word, xanh, for both blue and green. It is not that they don't see the distinction--they do--but when they feel a need to be clearer than just "xanh," they handle it by using a "like" phrase--xanh like the sky, xanh like the grass. (there's a parallel situation with limes and lemons, which are both "chanh," though they clearly see the difference. It's just that a difference that makes no difference IS no difference, linguistically, and they rarely have a need to distinguish between big yellow chanh and small green chanh. Both are sour, that's the point. And both can be used in phỏ!

But this does carry over into English problems, where even today my husband is as likely to use "green" for "blue" and vice versa. This bothered me so much I brought a Pantone color wheel set home to test him, in case he was actually perceiving something else. He wasn't. It was more a matter of "blue, green, xanh, who cares? Does it really matter?"

Which made for a very interesting discussion when he finally grasped the idea that my aunt had green eyes. The rest of the family having blue eyes, he just kept agreeing with me "Yes, of course she has green(=xanh) eyes, so do you all have the same (=xanh) eyes, why are we even having this conversation?" Finally I resorted to point and compare, and got total amazement out of him. He had never seen a human being with "xanh-like-grass" eyes, only "xanh-like-sky". So he clearly knew the difference, and knew ahead of time that real people just don't HAVE those-color eyes (heh). But the language was getting in the way.

If you think about it, English is weird in having a special name for pastel red--i.e. pink. Why? We don't have a special separate name for pastel green, or blue, or orange. I suppose we do for black (= gray). And there are the artsy names most of us don't learn till vocabulary class in school, like lilac and lavendar. But these are uncommon and rarely used.

Seriously, when was the last time anybody described a dress as pastel red?

Are other languages like this?
 
Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :
 
There was an amusing scene in one of the retellings of the origin of the Legion of Super-Heroes (which is set in the distant future), and one of the characters reacts to his costume: "Pink? But I asked for pale scarlet!" [Smile]
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
"Glas" is Irish for both green and grey.

The colour of the sky does change a lot though so I'm not really surprised if "blue" isn't the default answer. The sky can be rosy, white, grey, azure, dark navy or almost black during the course of an average 24 hours but isn't limited to that.
 
Posted by JoannaP (# 4493) on :
 
LC,

I can't remember all the details, but languages seem to acquire words for colour in a standard order and having one word for "grue" is not uncommon. If you want to know more, I recommend Through the Looking Glass by Guy Deutscher.
AFAIK, Russian is the only language to have a colour distinction that English does not; they use totally different words for light blue and navy blue.
 
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
I always get mad when people go on about Homer and the wine-dark sea. If you look at it at certain times of day (I used to have a calendar picture of a sunset) it jolly well looks like a red wine. Have these people no eyes?

Then there's the word kyan. Apparently it cannot be interpreted as related to modern cyan. But it was used not only for clouds and rocks, but also for Egyptian faience, which is a turquoise colour.

There is a group of people who do not want the Greeks to have seen blue.

Athena is described as glaukopticon - which, like the Irish glas, is either grey or green, perhaps cabbagey?

I think it would be interesting to test people with a printed spectrum with no clues as to the boundaries between colours, and ask them to draw dividing lines and identify the colours that thay have divided the thing into. I suspect there would be a lot of variation in the position of the green/blue division, as I think people have learned different names for parts of the peacock/petrol/teal/turquoise range. And I bet they wouldn't find indigo easy to find, either.

And I saw pale blue/gold, interpreting the blue as white, until I moved the screen to a different angle.

[ 03. March 2015, 10:50: Message edited by: Penny S ]
 
Posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
jj--

I can't see the difference.

Thanks for that great article!
I did, and I agree it's subtle.
 
Posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Kelly Alves:
I see a definite contrast, but my brain still wants to interpret the lighter color in the dress photo as a shadow.

Something like white text laid over an image like this.
Exactly that. The one with the overwriting on it does look bluer than the same photo without the writing, but my brain is still informing me in no uncertain terms that it's actually badly photographed white.
 
Posted by JoannaP (# 4493) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I think it would be interesting to test people with a printed spectrum with no clues as to the boundaries between colours, and ask them to draw dividing lines and identify the colours that thay have divided the thing into. I suspect there would be a lot of variation in the position of the green/blue division, as I think people have learned different names for parts of the peacock/petrol/teal/turquoise range. And I bet they wouldn't find indigo easy to find, either.
Linguists armed with standardised colour charts have interrogated people speaking different languages and in different cultures and there is surprising agreement about which is the reddest red and the yellowest yellow etc. and the dividing lines between the main colours. When people who do not distinguish between blue and green are asked to point to the gruest grue, the majority choose the colour that those who do distinguish think is the bluest blue and the minority the greenest green. None choose the blue-green area, which suggests that we do perceive colours very similarly, just have very different words for them.

Reverting to an earlier point made by Lamb Chopped, IIRC, most languages that have a word for brown, also have a word for pink. Humans apparently do see the need to have a special word for pale red but not pale green. [Confused]

Penny, the book by Guy Deutscher that I recommended above starts with a discussion of Homeric colour terms and the misunderstandings that have arisen. It really is a fascinating read - it was also interesting to learn that so much research has been done in this area.
 
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
Once I had a car that to me was purple and to everybody else was dark blue.
 
Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Once I had a car that to me was purple and to everybody else was dark blue.
I get made fun of quite a lot because I will identify something as purple, and everyone else sees blue. Perhaps we can see the bit of red in the color?
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
JoannaP,

Perhaps because humans come in shades of brown and pink, but not shades of green?
 
Posted by Pearl B4 Swine (# 11451) on :
 
From babyhood on, kids are taught what the names of colors are. The name of the color of leaves on most trees is "green". So they learn to name other things that look the same way, like cars, or paint, or peas as "green". But I wonder if what they call green is the same as what I call green.

My mother had a party dress made of a fabric called watered taffeta. It was bluish-lavender, and had a pattern of wavy designs which shifted around when you moved the fabric. I was fascinated with this dress, and loved looking at it, making the pastel colors melt into each other and shift. Does anyone else remember "watered taffeta"?

Just yesterday I was staring at tiny blobs of ice on a yew tree in my back yard. The sunshine was causing them to appear twinkling different vivid colors. Beautiful. Yes, prisms.

One last thing: Dazzle camouflage. Fooling the eye by obliterating the edges of shapes by pattern and color. Used on ships trying to avoid enemy hits in both World Wars. I'm straying away from "what color is this dress" a good bit, but still related to how, and by what name people perceive color.

BTW, I see The Dress as a very pale blue, with muddy gold strips.
 
Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
I just got a puzzle app, a d boy, has it been making me think of this conversation. At one point I was tryimg to figure oit where this mustard yellow piece went, and it turned out it was a shadowed bit of a bright orange wall.
 
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
quote:
jedijudy: I get made fun of quite a lot because I will identify something as purple, and everyone else sees blue. Perhaps we can see the bit of red in the color?
I get a lot of that too. I don't know if I still have a picture of my old car, it would be interesting to put it through Gimp and see if there's any red in there. Maybe we're more sensitive for red than most people.
 
Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Pearl B4 Swine:
From babyhood on, kids are taught what the names of colors are. The name of the color of leaves on most trees is "green". So they learn to name other things that look the same way, like cars, or paint, or peas as "green". But I wonder if what they call green is the same as what I call green.
I believe that Japanese has no word for "green" - thus traffic lights are "blue". Whether the availability of a word for a colour has any effect on peoples' perceptions of it, I do not know. (For instance, some descriptions of a rainbow's colours include "indigo" as a separate colour, while others don't).
 
Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
... And I saw pale blue/gold, interpreting the blue as white, until I moved the screen to a different angle.
So did I; the further up the screen the image was, the closer to blue/black it became.

I'd love to see the dress in Real Life™, in broad daylight, and then in artificial light, just to see what colour(s) I perceived it to be.
 
Posted by Trudy Scrumptious (# 5647) on :
 
I've been firmly on Team White/Gold since the picture started circulating -- I can accept that the actual dress, as pictured in other photos such as the Amazon site, actually IS blue and black, but I haven't been able to see the original photo as anything other than white and gold, and couldn't understand how anyone else was seeing blue/black in that particular photo.

I just opened my Facebook feed and a friend's post about "the dress" was at the top of the page, and I immediately saw it as blue and black. First time ever seeing it that way. Wow. Brains are weird eh?
 
Posted by Graven Image (# 8755) on :
 
Blue and Gold although the gold looks more like brown.
 
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
I will have to look out for that book.*

People do not actually come in pink, like they don't come in white - they come in a sort of beige with some red in. Pale brown, basically. Pink isn't, in my opinion, just pale red - unless the red is crimson, with some blue in it. Pale scarlet is a bit different from what is usually identified as pink. And some pinks are quite dark - I am currently wearing some, probably a deep rose - rather like the cover of "Check your privilege" up to the right.

I remember being with my nieces, when very small, looking through a magazine while my sister made a meal. We were talking about colour. "And don't," she instructed me, "dare tell them about pink." So we turned over the page, only to discover roses. "What is that colour?" they asked. Can't remember how we resolved that.

Two odd things have stuck in my mind regarding perceptions. One was the story of a young girl who had had severely limited early years, donfined in one room without contact. when rescued, she was taught language, and taken about to experience the world. In a haberdashery, she asked about the colours of threads, and was surprised that there was not an individual colour name for each shade.

The other was the parrot Alex and his tutor Irene Pepperberg. He had been taught primary colour words associated with plastic shapes, and the TV programme was demonstrating that he could answer correctly. If he was asked the colour, he would use the colour word. If asked the shape, he would use the shape word. So far so good. He knew yellow, blue and red. Then Pepperberg showed him a corn cob, which he asked for. She told him he could have it if he told her the colour. He repeated that he wanted it. She repeated that he must tell her the colour. He hunched his wings. He sulked. He would not tell her the colour. My friend and I watched, enchanted, especially as Alex announced, as he shuffled along the perch, "I go away now."

It seemed to me that he simply had not realised that the colour he had seen in the plastic geometric shape was supposed to be the same as a corn cob. Which it isn't.

*I have a reason for wanting to know about the interpretation of Homer's use of kyan.
 
Posted by Banner Lady (# 10505) on :
 
In a room with 4 children and 5 adults, everyone saw the same pic on my daughter's iPhone. 2 of the boys saw blue & black, the rest of us gold & white.

My reaction to all this was: 'Hmmm I wonder how many poor science teachers are going to have to wade through badly written project pieces this year about this stupid pic?"

I feel sorry for all those people who are now fretting about their own ability to perceive colour, or everyone else's ability to see truth.

It may seem like a dumb story, but I reckon it WILL have consequences. I will be fascinated to see how long it takes for the dress to be forgotten by the media.
 
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
It already has; we're on to weasels riding on woodpeckers' backs now. Thankfully.
 
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
Forgot to mention - about indigo. There is a reason it is hard to see. (I can't) It was an artefact of the other side of Isaac Newton's mind. There had to be seven colours to tie up with seven astrological planets (including Sun and Moon) and the seven notes of the Pythagorean scale from doh to ti. And probably the days of the week and anything else that comes in sevens. Like the seven seals (and all the rest) of Revelation. The seven stars of the Plough, Orion, or the Pleieades. Or the seven major metals (ruled by the planets) - gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, iron, tin and lead

Six would make more sense for people with three colour receptors, or with reference to three primary pigments. But seven were necessary for the light to fit with astrology and alchemy. Indigo is what happens when that sort of thing is mixed with science.

[ 03. March 2015, 21:45: Message edited by: Penny S ]
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
That's not a weasel, that's my ex-wife in a gold dress. Oops, am I allowed to say that?
 
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on :
 
What Curiosity Killed said. I see the dress behind the Or as a very light shade of blue that I am translating to a-bad-picture-of-white and the word or is a pure white.
 
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
At last I know that weasels are weaselly distinguished because they are so much smaller than the stoatally different stoats.
 
Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :
 
Good on the old Sally Ann for their take on the dress issue.

That dress.
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
xkcd "Dress Color" comic. Hold mouse pointer over the pics for a message.
 


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