It’s already been a year since #TheDress blew our minds and made pretty much everybody in the world question their eyesight.
For those who still swear the dress was absolutely white and gold—it was actually blue and black—it’s taken a lot of work just to trust their eyes once again.
But thanks to Tumblr, any progress you’ve made in the last year is about to be blown to pieces by #TheDress’ even more confusing twin, this jacket:
So, go ahead and try it out: What color is this jacket?
But why? How can so many of us see different colors in one single photo? Rest assured, you’re probably not color blind.
According to several different papers published in the journal Current Biology, certain colors and lighting can be ambiguous.
Take #TheDress, for instance. University of Nevada, Reno psychologist Michael Webster claims that because the photo of the blue dress was taken in blue lighting, it’s hard for many of us to clearly see the dress itself as blue.
In another study, the researchers concluded that the way we see certain colors has to do with the way the brain perceives colors in the natural daylight.
According to Live Science:
“The researchers found that the colors people reported are the same colors found in daylight — which tends to be bluish at noon and yellowish at dawn or dusk.”
In other words, the colors we see at certain times of day can constantly change, depending on the lighting.
"By studying the pair of colors in 'The Dress,' we can answer the age-old question: Do you see colors the way that I see them? And the answer is sometimes 'no,'" Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who teaches at Wellesley College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement.
