Is This Dress White & Gold or Black & Blue?

By Lauren Tuck

Fashion is often controversial but never has a sartorial debate caused such divisiveness.

Tumblr user swiked uploaded a photo of a dress a minidress and posed the question, ”Guys please help me—is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree…” And swiked’s friends aren’t the only ones at odds with each other. 

The hashtags #thisdress, #blackandblue and #whiteandgold and the phrase “What colour is this dress?” were all trending on Twitter on Thursday.

Hundreds of thousands of social media users, celebrities included, weighed in. Mindy Kaling got especially heated, dragging Julianne Moore and BJ Novak into the conversation:

Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and nearly everyone you follow on Twitter and Instagram injected their personal opinion as to what colour the dress is.

There has yet to be a definitive answer as to what colour combination it really is but there are some theories to explain the dispute. 

If a photo is taken in poor lighting it can certainly appear differently in a photo than it does in real life. According to Adobe, the dress is blue and proved it was by using the software’s colour tool.

And YouTube celebrity Brad The Lad Long was apparently pranking the Internet with an elaborate experiment. He says that the dress is white and gold (phew, I agree) and the fact that some are seeing it as black and blue is because science has proven that when there is a big event in one’s life that is having a negative impact then sighting of colours can vary.

So who’s to be believed? Adobe or a YouTuber? Can’t wait for this mystery to finally be solved.