Recent from talks
The dress
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
The dress
The dress was a 2015 online viral phenomenon centred on a photograph of a dress. Viewers disagreed on whether the dress was blue and black, or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception and became the subject of scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science.
The phenomenon originated in a photograph of a dress posted on the social networking platform Facebook. The dress was black and blue, but the conditions of the photograph caused many to perceive it as white and gold, creating debate. Within a week, more than ten million tweets had mentioned the dress. The retailer of the dress, Roman Originals, reported a surge in sales and produced a one-off version in white and gold sold for charity.
In February 2015, about a week before the wedding of Grace and Keir Johnston, of Colonsay, Scotland, the bride's mother, Cecilia Bleasdale, took a photograph of a dress at Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet north of Chester, England. Bleasdale intended to wear the dress at the wedding and sent the photograph to Grace. The dress was coloured blue with black lace. However, Grace told her mother she perceived it in the photograph as white with gold lace.
After Grace posted the photograph on Facebook, her friends also disagreed; some saw it as white with gold, while others saw it as blue with black. For a week, the debate became well known in Colonsay, a small island community.
On the day of the wedding, Caitlin McNeill, a friend of the bride and groom, performed with her band at the wedding. Even after seeing that the dress was "obviously blue and black" in reality, the musicians remained preoccupied by the photograph. They said they almost failed to make it on stage because they were caught up discussing the dress. A few days later, on 26 February, McNeill reposted the image to her blog on Tumblr, creating further public discussion surrounding the image.
The most interesting thing to me is that it traveled. It went from New York media circle-jerk Twitter to international. And you could see it in my Twitter notifications because people started having conversations in, like, Spanish and Portuguese and then Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Arabic. It was amazing to watch this move from a local thing to, like, a massive international phenomenon.
Cates Holderness, who ran the Tumblr page for BuzzFeed at the site's New York offices, received a message from McNeill asking for help resolving the colour dispute of the dress. She dismissed it, but checked the page near the end of her workday and saw that it had received around 5,000 notes, a large amount for Tumblr. Tom Christ, Tumblr's director of data, said at its peak the page was receiving 14,000 views a second (or 840,000 views per minute), well over the normal rates. Later that night, the number of notes increased tenfold.
Holderness showed the picture to other members of the BuzzFeed social media team, who immediately began arguing about the dress colours. She created a simple poll for Tumblr users, then left work and took the subway home. When she got off the train and checked her phone, it was overwhelmed by messages. That evening, the page set a new record at BuzzFeed for concurrent visitors, and eventually peaked at 673,000.
Hub AI
The dress AI simulator
(@The dress_simulator)
The dress
The dress was a 2015 online viral phenomenon centred on a photograph of a dress. Viewers disagreed on whether the dress was blue and black, or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception and became the subject of scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science.
The phenomenon originated in a photograph of a dress posted on the social networking platform Facebook. The dress was black and blue, but the conditions of the photograph caused many to perceive it as white and gold, creating debate. Within a week, more than ten million tweets had mentioned the dress. The retailer of the dress, Roman Originals, reported a surge in sales and produced a one-off version in white and gold sold for charity.
In February 2015, about a week before the wedding of Grace and Keir Johnston, of Colonsay, Scotland, the bride's mother, Cecilia Bleasdale, took a photograph of a dress at Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet north of Chester, England. Bleasdale intended to wear the dress at the wedding and sent the photograph to Grace. The dress was coloured blue with black lace. However, Grace told her mother she perceived it in the photograph as white with gold lace.
After Grace posted the photograph on Facebook, her friends also disagreed; some saw it as white with gold, while others saw it as blue with black. For a week, the debate became well known in Colonsay, a small island community.
On the day of the wedding, Caitlin McNeill, a friend of the bride and groom, performed with her band at the wedding. Even after seeing that the dress was "obviously blue and black" in reality, the musicians remained preoccupied by the photograph. They said they almost failed to make it on stage because they were caught up discussing the dress. A few days later, on 26 February, McNeill reposted the image to her blog on Tumblr, creating further public discussion surrounding the image.
The most interesting thing to me is that it traveled. It went from New York media circle-jerk Twitter to international. And you could see it in my Twitter notifications because people started having conversations in, like, Spanish and Portuguese and then Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Arabic. It was amazing to watch this move from a local thing to, like, a massive international phenomenon.
Cates Holderness, who ran the Tumblr page for BuzzFeed at the site's New York offices, received a message from McNeill asking for help resolving the colour dispute of the dress. She dismissed it, but checked the page near the end of her workday and saw that it had received around 5,000 notes, a large amount for Tumblr. Tom Christ, Tumblr's director of data, said at its peak the page was receiving 14,000 views a second (or 840,000 views per minute), well over the normal rates. Later that night, the number of notes increased tenfold.
Holderness showed the picture to other members of the BuzzFeed social media team, who immediately began arguing about the dress colours. She created a simple poll for Tumblr users, then left work and took the subway home. When she got off the train and checked her phone, it was overwhelmed by messages. That evening, the page set a new record at BuzzFeed for concurrent visitors, and eventually peaked at 673,000.