Is this Adidas Jacket Blue and White or Black and Brown?

In a sequel to last year’s viral debate about the true colour of the black/black white/gold dress, an Adidas jacket has gone viral in the past week for the same reason. Is this jacket blue and white or black and brown? Well, that depends.

Posted originally on Tumble by a user called Poppunkblogger, the Adidas jacket was posted along with the message, “I hate to make a new blue/black white/gold dress mem but my friend has this jacket and she says it’s white and blue but I see black and brown pls tell me what you see.”

In Feb. 27, 2015, an overexposed image of a $77 dress because an Internet sensation, generating millions of arguments about whether the dress was blue and black or white and gold. It was eventually revealed that the true colours of the  dress are black and blue. But why the confusion?

Scientists weighed in at the time to explain that the disagreements about colour are most likely caused by a mechanism in the brain that ensures an object is always  seen to be the same colour, regardless of what the light conditions are. So for example, bright natural daylight is blueish in colour so the brain subtracts blue to adjust for the situation. By contrast, artificial light is yellowish, so the brain works to subtract yellow. The result is that in both cases, the object appears to be the same colour.  Also important for your brain to work out a colour is context. So for example, nearby colours like red or green help your brain to determine exactly how much yellow or blue light to subtract.

In the case of the dress, and now this Adidas jacket, the objects are each seen in isolation so the brain has no other points of colour reference to rely upon. Blue as a colour is particularly difficult for the brain to process, so some people take away too much blue, thus seeing the dress as white and gold. Other people’s brains correctly subtract the yellows, seeing the dress as blue and black.

Adidas had yet to verify what the actual color of the jacket is, but you can this poll to see how the majority view the jacket.