by Rebecca Lumley

Today is the day that communities have been divided, fights have been started and everybody’s been tweeting furiously; all because of one dress. Forget the Oscars dresses or fashion week; this is the garment that has captured the world’s attention!

The middle image above is the dress in question, a dress that people just can’t agree on the colour of. Is it blue and black? Taylor Swift, Jaden Smith and Mindy Kaling think so.

Or is it white and gold? Anna Kendrick, Cheryl Cole and Kim Kardashian would certainly tell you it is.

Since the debate went viral, the internet has been awash with explanations of why people see the colours differently. Cones, wavelengths, rays- here’s how Wired.com explained the discrepancy.

“Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image … Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at … This image, though, hits some kind of perceptual boundary.”

So there you have it, the dress is blue and black in real life but deceiving on camera. Either way, I’m not a fan.