The Dress

[Mirage]

It's blue and black. The yellowish light source in the room creates a goldish color in the blacks. It only looks white and gold if your head for some reason assumes the lighting in the room is blue, for whatever reason.

That's not how pixels work, the colours in the actual image are not black or a dark blue.

I think my head just makes no assumptions about colours when dealing with pixelated images.

I know how pixels work. Way to not get the point, bob.

All humans have an automatic white-balance feature. It sometimes gets confused (like when people think the dress is gold and white), but it would be pretty troutty to not have AWB at all.

Considering the dress doesn't exist in white and gold (yet) but does exist in blue and black, it is safe to say that the people who thinks it's white and gold are the ones whose white balance got confused.

Although, I'll admit that we don't have all that much color information to go on in this picture, so it's understandable that some gets it wrong.