This Optical Illusion Shoe Photo Has The Internet in a Tailspin

The debate over the dress that some believed to be black and blue and others white and gold may have settled, but two years in its wake, a new debate has risen: are the tennis shoes mint and gray or pink and white?

In a scene reminiscent of The Dress Armageddon of 2015 that nearly threatened to tear the internet to shreds, a new debate over the color of a pair of tennis shoes has sent social media into a tailspin, with people taking a firm stance on what colors they see.

The pair of Vans sneakers, now quickly making the round on social media, are either seen as gray and mint (or teal) or pink and white.

Some, however, said that their perception changed the longer that they looked at the shoe.

One person even offered an explanation as to why people are seeing different colors.

The true color of the shoe is pink and white, as seen in an image from Vans’ website, though it turns out that there is an actual explanation as to why people see different colors in both case of the infamous dress and now the pair of tennis shoes, and it all has to do with how our eyes and minds process color.

“This is related to the famous dress insofar as both are related to issues of color constancy. Basically your visual system is constantly trying to color correct the images projected on the retina, to remove the color contamination introduced by the spectral bias in the light source,” Bevil Conway, an investigator with the National Eye Institute, told the Huffington Post.

“In that manipulated photograph there is a lot of the turquoise cast over the whole image. When you first look at it, after having looked at the pink version, your visual system is still adapted to the lighting conditions of the pink version and so you see the turquoise in the other version, and you attribute this to the shoe itself,” he continued. “But after a while, your visual system adapts to the turquoise across the whole of that image and interprets it as part of the light source, eventually discounting it and restoring the shoe to the original pink version (or at least pinker).”

As for how to determine the true color of the shoe, Bevil advised to look for cues from the surroundings, including the color of the light in the photograph, focusing on the shoelaces, and the color of the person’s skin.