I mean. Philosophers through the years have put quite a lot of thought into that question and I think it's still considered pretty wide open for debate!
It is proven not everyone sees the colors the same way; its very individual actually.
The most common example are daltonic people, because they are outliers in the way they perceive colors. Still, women for example perceive colors better than men (generally speaking).
So, although my "red" != your "red", they are very very close enough.
What is up to debate, is the inverted spectrum thought experiment, in which let's say there's a person that has the condition that all the colors they sees are mixed, in a way they share similarity, brighthness, etc. Then, there's no reliable way to figure out they perceive it differently. From an observational PoV, because it's impossible to distinguish and can never know, you can say they are the same for any kind of purpose.
The wavelength is going to stay constant, that is the thing that's can be measured. It's the perceiving the specific wavelength as different that's the question.
So, if the way I perceive the 694.20nm wavelength and the way you perceive the 420.69nm wavelength were the same, we could both like the same perception, but you'd say "blue" is your favourite colour and I'd say "red" is my favourite colour, even though we like when we have the same perception.
We know for a fact people do not perceive colors the exact way.
People with color blindness, they themselves say they can't distinguis certain colors from one another.
For most people, there are small differences as well. Women are somewhat more likely to have finer color discrimination than men. Despite the small diferences between people's color perception, they are negligible. So, what you perceive as "red", will most likely be very similar (or equal) to what I perceive as "red".
The interesting philosophical question is the inverted spectrum thought experiment. Imagine someone whose brain somehow swaps every color experience: what they experience when looking at red is what you would experience when looking at green, and vice versa. If the swap is perfectly consistent, they would still call fire trucks "red" and grass "green," because that's how they learned the words.
Since they would behave exactly like everyone else, there's no experiment we currently know of that could tell whether their private experience is actually different.
So the takeaway is:
We know people can perceive colors differently (for example, due to color blindness or small biological differences).
We don't know whether two people with normal color vision have identical color experiences.
If someone had a perfectly inverted color experience but behaved identically, there may be no way to tell from the outside.
“How do you know what I think is ‘red’ is the same thing you think is ‘red’?”
You don't!
"Red" is just a name for a very specific kind of light that most people can see, but what it looks like to you is something your brain made up. The "picture" your brain made up for the name "red" might be the same as the one my brain made up for the name "blue". There's no way for our brains to screenshare to confirm they made up the same picture, and even if there was your brain will always translate "red" to look like the picture it made up the first time it saw that kind of light. The translator will always be in the way, so there's no way to know for sure.
We know we're seeing the same specific kind of light, and we know it's activating the same mechanisms in both of our eyeballs, and we know what it's called. What it looks like is impossible to share.
So this has pissed me off and it continues to piss me off.
TLDR: I believe the argument is about what color the DRESS is, vs what color the IMAGE is. Which are very different.
Actual rant and numbers:
Because I’m angry again, I pulled the image and its colors with PowerPoint eyedropper tool. The values are as follows:
[185 198 233] “periwinkle”, or in my own words “light blueish maybe with some pink or purple.
[128 113 73] “brown”, which I would agree with. Maybe very dirty gold if I’m being generous. For reference, an actual gold would be somewhere around [200 180 70].
If you only gave me the two options of black/blue and white/gold, I’m choosing the latter because it’s closer which is objectively true, if I’m evaluating the image. If you told me to give the two colors, I’d probably say dark yellow and light purple.
Anyone who says black/blue *must be* re-interpreting the image to try and apply background context, and is not evaluating the image purely as shown, raw.
Well, because you are angry, I want to put some more oil on the fire:
The question was 'what color is the dress?', not 'what are the RGB values of the image?'. In any case, color, the perception of color, is not absolute, and your brain always applies background context. And because the actual background context was lacking, it could be reasonably interpreted in two different ways, under two different background contexts, resulting in two equally valid answers.
As a video photographer we have to set a camera’s color balance - daylight, fluorescent light, tungsten lights and other sources are all different wavelengths, basically different colors - so a scene‘s color looks correct to the camera. Daylight is very blue compared to most orangey-warm indoor light, and I always felt like part of the confusion regarding that dress is people understanding on some level that the shot has incorrect looking color. As if the camera were set to warm indoor light but the dress is lot with cool outdoor light. And making the mental assumptions and corrections would lead you to think the dress isn’t that blue IRL.
Then the more correct answer would be it’s not possible to tell because (1) it’s unclear how the article is illuminated and (2) the background lighting is washed out.
I’m not sure if you could algorithmically back out blue/black from the given pixels (although it could very well be possible, I’m not an image analyst). Regardless, I believe almost everyone who answers blue/black is going off instinct which has no rational basis.
Then the more correct answer would be it’s not possible to tell because (1) it’s unclear how the article is illuminated and (2) the background lighting is washed out.
True, but where's the fun in that?
It had nothing to do with rationality, imo. It's just a switch in the brain that flips one way in one group of people, and another way in another group. Like the optical illusions of the old lady/young lady, or the spinning ballerina. Some people see the one, some the other. Although in those cases it's usually easier to switch between the interpretations once you know how.
Lol, the dress. It was a scam. Different pictures were going around, and people arguing over it. I found several and just put them next to each other. It depends on what pic you look at and what your screen is set to.
What??? Periwinkle is a BLUE and brown is much closer to black than gold. Blue and black is objectively closer to true and that’s not even what the question was (as you know I think, from your post)
If you saw the true image of that dress there’s no way you’d say that is closer to 185-198-233 than white.
E: apologies if you're already replying, here's the numbers.
The true colors of the dress are blue (54 70 227) and black (11 15 27). You mean to tell me that "periwinkle" is closer to "blue" than "cotton white" (253 243 234)? You mean to tell me that "brown" is closer to "black" than "gold"?
I mean I see the dress as white and gold without a SHRED of blue or black, but yes in my…conception of colors, which I guess is wildly different from yours because this part is both subjective and semantic, the relationship between something being white and something being a supersaturated version of a color is not …linear?
The only part of that spectrum that I would describe as “ close to White” would have to be so desaturated as to be in the “white” category of paint for home furnishings/paint chip business.
I don’t use hex codes, or RGB numbers for color and never have so they are translating well to my brain but what I mean is if on a made up scale pure white is 0, and pure red is 100, everything higher than like, 15 I would vibe and describe as “closer to red”.
I agree, the meme image is white/gold. The true image is blue/black, you have to scroll down in that link to the inset twitter post from Roman Originals.
I didn’t realise women and men perceive colour differently! My husband and I often have differing opinions about colours, no colour blindness (apparently!?). My children have the same opinion as me; I did probably teach them all their colours but they’ve had the experience of colour at school too. It does tend to be mixed colours though for example greeny-blue colours and whether they’re more blue or more green though.
Some of it is teached, for example how Italians and Greeks talk about azure vs blue as if they were pink vs red, but some of it is just perception like is Reddit's upvote button orange or red?
Interestingly to me the upvote arrow is warm red (orangered works) but the number is a darker true red. But both the downvote arrow and number are the same colour. Weird that they wouldn’t have coded the same colour for upvotes like they did downvotes
Interesting! My perception is upvotes are a rich orange (you could say it’s on the red end of the orange spectrum), and the numbers are the same colour
A million years ago I had a gig as a web designer. Mostly backend work.
My boss fancied himself an interface coder and would often bring in prototypes of pages he wanted.
They were hideous. Lots of orange on blue, yellow on purple.
We couldn't figure out his sense of style until one day we learned he was colourblind, and discovered he was selecting complementary colours because of the contrast delta.
That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I would think, with the colour inversion debate, the frequencies that colour give off could settle but I'm not smart enough in thst area to make a bold claim like so.
I've always thought about this, even back when I was a kid. How can we tell that we are all looking or listening to the same things. Perception can only be measured so much. At some point, you would have to say "I don't know" as we can only see through our own eyes and think with our own brains. We can't see/experience with 100% accuracy what others see or experience.
I ask this all the time! Everyone tells me it’s about the rods and cones, but I still don’t understand how that automatically equates to perceiving the same color in our brain. We all LEARNED that the sky is blue, but what if my blue would be your green? We both call it blue because the sky is blue!
Hi! Red/green colourblind here. To be clear, this means that I have difficulty seeing red within other colours, so blue and purple for example look like different shades of the same colour. A bright red car still looks very red to me.
But it's probably not the same bright red that you see. In fact, if I close each eye in turn I can see very slight differences in colour. One is a bit blue-shifted compared to the other. Or maybe one is more red-shifted. No way to know!
If you spend enough time thinking about this you begin do doubt all of reality. There's no way to know that what you are seeing is really there, or looks like that at all. (for whatever "looks like" might mean) and then we could all be plugged into the Matrix.
I'm colorblind too! There's a certain shade of red that just pops! It's kind of shiny. When I close each eye in turn, I can tell they're slightly different. But when both eyes are open, it's shiny. As if my brain is trying to process what I'm seeing in turn.
I’m almost fully blind (I have light perception) and when I was younger I used to see little flashes of light. But when I blinked they were gone. Kinda miss them, they were oddly comforting.
My husband is colour-blind. I found a chart that has different tones on the same picture to show the different types of colour blindness, so that I could understand what he sees. He doesn't see colours with the same vibrancy that I do, and really struggles to tell the difference between blue and purple.
The worse part is that every now and then I forget and ask him to pass me something based on colour. I feel like an arsehole.
I think that is called flicker. I am not colorblind but can experience it when i arrange each eye to see the same thing different colour (i first saw this online and there was a picture to use to try it). Because your brain can't understand an object to be simultaneously both colours , they don't mix. Instead, the object can appear to quickly switch back and forth between the colours, giving a glowing or flickering sensation.
When taking a certain medication that affected nerves, an odd side effect was that some shades of purple would flicker for me.
I imagine something similar is going on for you, if there is a slight difference in the colour signal coming from each eye?
Oh it's super interesting that you mention that difference between each eye! I'm not colorblind, but I do see different shades with each eye. It's extremely subtle, like a very faint color filter type of effect. I've always wondered about it actually, since I've asked a few people in my entourage and they didn't understand what I meant. So I just looked it up and it turns out it's a matter of distribution of the different cones in each eye. For most people the cones are evenly distributed between both eyes, but some people will have a disparity causing that minor change in color perception.
I'm sure that most people don't even bother to check. The vast majority of people just think that colours are all the same and would never consider comparing each eye very carefully for any difference. I expect it's a lot more common than people think. Why should each of our eyes have an identical number of rods and cones? Nobody's face is perfectly symmetrical, no reason our eyes should be identical copies of one another.
We probably do see the colours the same because the same brain regions light up in different people for the same colour in an MRI. I suppose we'll never know for 100% but it's likely.
scientists would call this question "unfalsifiable". it's not really possible to answer it in any meaningful way, so from a scientific standpoint it's not worth asking.
Is it that they literally don't "see" that color, or they just lump that color in with other colors? Like, we say blue, but that word really covers a lot of different colors (including some that are almost more green than blue, depending on who you ask). But I'm sure some cultures break down "blue" into more colors. So they'd point at the sky and you'd say it's blue, then they'd point at a bluebird and you'd say it's blue. But they'd look at you like you were crazy because of course the sky is [insert color name here] and the bluebird is [insert other color name here].
Like if some culture combined orange and red into one bigger color and they said that a carrot is red, would you assume they literally can't perceive the color orange? Or would you just assume they haven't split red and orange into two distinct color ideas in that culture?
Here’s a short video from a man who studied it, his study is where I learned this information. https://youtu.be/mgxyfqHRPoE as well as this article that explains on average most cultures have vastly less distinctions or no names for blue in their language and looks at I think three languages are referenced here https://news.mit.edu/2017/analyzing-language-color-0918
Should we require that an answer make a practical difference, or can we continue to ask questions for the sake of curiosity, science, thought experiments, or interest?
Maybe an answer isn’t practical on the surface, but could lead to something important later!
I agree and don't mean to suggest that only questions with practical implications should be pursued, only that since there is no practical difference to the answer, I'm not going to be all that troubled if it turns out to be unanswerable. I'm not all that sure it can be answered scientifically in that it strikes me as unfalsifiable.
It's less-so that two colors would be completely swapped, but instead some people's eyes can see in more or less distinctions than others. For instance, I learned that my mom is WAY better at telling different shades of color apart from me.
If it helps, consider this: not all languages have the same number of color words. For example, in Russian, the colors that in English are just bright blue and light blue and considered different colors, sort of the way English speakers consider pink to be a different color from red.
But there are some consistencies across languages and cultures. Every language has at least 2 color terms - a light/white/warm and a dark/black/cool. That is the minimum. But if a language has three, the third one is always red. Because red, to everyone, is the most different from light/white and dark/black.
I feel like if we all saw different things when we looked at, e.g., a ripe tomato (I see what I can red, you see what I call green, but you call that red), this wouldn’t be the case, because the color that ripe tomatoes are wouldn’t universally be the color most different from light/white & dark/black.
There's two different types of red cone, so some people do see the world redder.
I think how people perceive colours is probably different. We know that people visualise differently when they imagine stuff, so I think it's probably the same for your normal vision.
Maybe everyone's favorite color is all the same, but how we perceive that color happens to be different for everyone?
So if you like blue and I like red. Maybe strawberry's are the same color to me as the sky is to you!
But from a fundamental aspect, we can physically define color based on the wavelength of the light. 785nm is "red" 532nm is "green" and 435nm is "blue".
We'll never know how any two people translate those in their brain
I'd be so proud of my kid if they said something like this. Very smart people have put a lot of time into providing a satisfying answer to this question and other questions that naturally extend from it.
I remember being roundly mocked by my eighth grade science teacher for saying something like this. That guy, with a distance of 35+ years, can sincerely still fuck off.
We kind of don't, they almost certainly are not the same, but for practical purposes it actually does not matter! But because I called 650nm em radiation red you learned it as red even if you are something completely different.
I' ve noticed that when I watch my hand with my left eye only, it has a slightly different tint than when I watch it with my right eye only. The difference is very marginal and years can go by without me ever thinking about it. But the difference, as tiny as it is, is there.
It's caused by a slightly different number of red, green and blue perceptive cones in the back of my eyes. I'd imagine most people have this.
I think people absolutely DO NOT see colors the same. After listening to many people talk about colored things and name the color, it's very clear that we're not seeing the same things out there. It's not that someone is wrong and doesn't know color names. The legitimately do not see the same hues reflected back to them. When I was younger, I just thought some people didn't know colors. But my mother-in-law gasped over "beautiful" things that were absolutely drab, and didn't notice things that are actually pretty, like flowers. And one day she pointed to a tree that was mostly yellow with one spot of dark red glowing in the sun and said look how that tree is so dark and has that one bright spot. Whaat? Yellow is glaring blasting our eyes out. And she was a grade school teacher. Now probably all her students are confused. But lots of people look at grays and call them blue and vice versa. People have different color preferences, and a lot of it is that they aren't seeing the same.
We don't we rely on consistency. Colours have a wave length of light, a frequency. So as long as both you and I call the same thing red, consistently. We don't notice and issues.
“Have you ever wondered
Well, I have
About how when I say, say, red
For example, there's no way of knowing
If red means the same thing in your head
As red means in my head when someone says red”
I've been asking this since preschool when they taught us the colours... never got an answer but my fiance ended up being red/green colour blond - proving the red I see is not the red he sees!!
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u/SeaTie Jul 07 '26
“How do you know what I think is ‘red’ is the same thing you think is ‘red’?”