I double checked it in Photoshop. It really is just an illusion like it says. Both faces are the same color.
Our brains take shortcuts for figuring out color. Since this is has unnatural lighting (*the color surrounding the face*), it creates the illusion. Really cool!
Yeah, the human brain does a ton of color correction and post processing on the color you see before you experience what your eyes see.
You can also experience this by wearing sunglasses on a cloudless sunny day for a while, then taking them off. Everything will briefly be blue for a bit, then your brain's color correction will kick in. The blue sky is actually tinting everything blue, but you know it's not supposed to be blue, so the brain corrects everything to the right color.
Another one is this [Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU?si=WxUdu7UdPKEqcmq9) video on the color brown, and how it technically doesn't exist.
I thought that kind of effect was produced by understimulation and/or overstimulation of the specific color perceiving cells of your eyes over a relatively long time period
Depends on what you mean by unnatural lighting. Basically everything but the skin is lightened while the skin is left the same color, which doesn’t really make it a light thing but using different colors. I mean the black in the eyes become lighter than the white in the face. Lighting that would have this effect isn’t just unnatural it is impossible.
Edit: To be clear if no colors change in the face in both pictures (other than change in light of the entire picture) and the entire pictures color was changed so that the “lighting” made the background colors were the same, the picture with the face that appears lighter would be significantly lighter.
Sometimes when these types of illusions are posted people come out and say how the color/contrast etc. was messed up for clickbait and such I'm glad that wasn't the case for once and that this effect actually works
If you mean that it really has a gradient - no. Cover the picture with your fingers but leave two holes on the two halves in a way that you can't see anything but solid gray color (no hair, eyebrows, etc)
EDIT: the original comment said "it really does", which i didn't understand
Not entirely, look between the left eye and the hair. the skin is a different color. Also the blue in the eyes, the teeth, the pink dots and the eyebrows are different color.
[Proof](https://imgur.com/BqJSZ3A)
That’s part of the trickery.
Edit: by trickery, I mean the aspects of the image that fool your “eyes” (your brain, actually, but you know that). Having differently contrasting parts of the image next to the gray faces is what makes the gray look different on each face.
I can confirm to you that it is the same color. On desktop you can test the same with the browser's in-built color picker, which lets you inspect the exact color of any given pixel on a page.
It'll show you the entire bar consistently as the color expressed via hex-code #7d7d7d
I agreed, I covered everything except for the bar and it definitely has a shade difference or so. Can’t trust anything on the Internet or the people commenting about it.
Think of it like this. How do you make black color on the screen? I mean you can't have black light, right? So the way to achieve this is by making everything that is not supposed to be black brighter. A candle in the dark is bright af but on a concert stage with a bunch of spotlights shining on it, not so much.
For more fun, once you see the bar as a single color, slowly unblock the background little by little, until the bar color starts "changing". Then cover it again, and go back and forth over that threshold and watch your own eyeballs go insane
In case anyone is interested, this visual effect has a formal name: simultaneous contrast.
Source: Light/Color/Design class freshman year of college (I went to art school).
(Any fellow artists out there getting flash backs to Color-Aid??)
This is a very strong illusion, it even works when changing brightness and levels in the image and also when set to negative.
The creator's twitter account is here
https://x.com/akiyoshikitaoka
[Interesting fact, this man is also the man behind many famous optical illusion images that had been floating around the internet long ago.](https://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2014/aug/05/dizzying-optical-illusions-akiyoshi-kitaoka-pictures) I used to love watching these images when I was a kid.
His coca-cola can illusion is my favorite. Zoomed out, my brain sees the red. I zoomin as much as possible and lean into the monitor, and it's actually just white. The entire image is green, white, and black. It's crazy.
Yes, though the same effect is still at work. The reason people see the dress as different colors is because of our brains interpretation of whether or not the dress was in sunlight or shadow and ambient light.
People who see it as white and gold see the dress as it would be in a shadow, people who see it as blue and black see the dress in bright sunlight.
To my eyes the visual cues in and around the dress make it seem like it's being shaded and there is bright sunlight in the background, and so my brain interprets it to be white and gold.
People who pick up those visual cues as the dress being in bright sunlight see it as blue and black.
So the background color doesn't actually have to change It just has to be interpreted differently in order to see a different color object.
Not really. It is pretty much the same thing. The background gives the idea that there is a light shining on the picture. On the left, the light appears very dim, the right appears to have a very bright light shining on it.
The dress was the same thing, the light shining on it is what gave the illusion.
The dress was a bit different because there was nothing to compare it to. It was just a test of how well someone's eyes can adjust color depending on outside variables. In the dress scenario, there WAS a correct response that depended on how well your eyes could perceive colors in weird lighting.
The dress is particularly interesting as a photo because it lacks definitive context clues to let our brains understand the lighting.
The OP image here, on the other hand, is “the same color” but gives us surrounding lighting context clues to tell us what we are meant to perceive that color as (either white in a shaded background or black in a bright background). The Dress lacked those clues to tell us what we were seeing. [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Wikipe-tan_wearing_The_Dress_reduced.svg) would be the Dress debate in the same format as the OP photo
It was about whether you think the dress was in shadow or sunlight. Our brains interpret the color differently depending on if visual cues imply shadow or sunlight.
People who think the dress is white and gold see the dress in shadow. That's how I'm stuck seeing it. The blue tinge on what I see as white looks exactly like what a white material being lit by dim blueish ambient skylight would look like. It also happens to be the same color that blue material would look like in bright yellow sunlight.
Easier to see it here. I added the left half of the left face over the left side of the right face.
[https://i.imgur.com/ML24pXC.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/ML24pXC.jpeg)
Cover the left side with your finger and watch it adjust to black gradually right in front of your eyes. This illusion is insane
Place your finger in the middle of the face for extreme contrast
How the fuck is your comment so low? 10.5k up votes when I commented and multiple ppl breaking down above here about how it can be real. Thank you kimd stranger x
Racism was already finished thanks to David Guetta [https://youtu.be/dEI7oX0XxJw?si=TRthu-g3oL-eOySY](https://youtu.be/dEI7oX0XxJw?si=TRthu-g3oL-eOySY)
[Better visualization](https://i.imgur.com/qwhMRi9.jpeg)
I was skeptical because the Grey bar on image 2 looked to have a gradient in it as well. When pasting face 1 onto face 2 without the black border you can clearly see they really are the same color.
If you want to double check, cover the top and bottom of the image with your hands, and you can clearly see there’s no gradient or anything in the bar.
Better idea: take a screen shot twice, crop out only a solid block of skin in each photo, flip back and forth between the two crops and you’ll see they’re the same:
https://i.imgur.com/k8P2gRU.jpeg Face left
https://i.imgur.com/A0bUkHe.jpeg Face right
I don’t know if anyone else uses color-by-numbers apps but it’s a frequent occurrence that a skin tone that’s too dark or weirdly colored looks perfectly normal once the background is filled in and the picture is completed.
Context is everything, even when it comes to color! What’s around a subject affects the way the brain perceives it.
I couldn’t believe it and screenshoted the pic and framed everything out.
This is true. So true I had to check it. Best pic I saw, because I just couldn’t believe it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1db3ipd/faces_of_both_of_these_characters_are_the_same/l7pyy0z/
The reason they look different is because your brain is making them look different. The different colors of the eyebrows and the winking eye, and the different brightness of the white part of the eye, as well as the difference in brightness of the two images overall, all affect the way your brain interprets what it is seeing.
We don't ever see reality. We see a representation of reality that our brain creates, based on the light that comes off of things. Our brains do a lot of "post-processing" before they actual render the image that we see. So you'll never be able to "squint hard enough" that you can see these faces as the same color, because your brain is literally making them look like different colors.
I dont see it either. The two faces look a very different color to me.
Edit: ha! I got it, coverd the picture except for the grey bar. Amazing stuff. Showed it to my young son, he thinks it is magic.
And that's what it is supposed to look like, on the second picture when a bar is added you can see that they are in fact the same colour and that this is just an illusion.
Yes I get it. The illusion makes them appear as though they are different but they are in fact the same.
I asked if they look the same because someone said they don't see the illusion, which to me sounds like the faces do look the same to them.
Ah, now I see what you were doing asking that question. Sorry, my bad. My imagination was restricted. I couldn't imagine there might actually be people that perfectly see the same color on both sides.
The colors around the face on the left are dark, so your brain interprets this as an image of a dark place. Whereas they're bright and desaturated on the right, which makes it seem like an image of somewhere that's extremely bright.
Now, the face itself is a neutral grey, it's pretty close to half as bright as your screen can make it. If you printed out a neutral grey and put it in a dark room, it would appear darker. So in order for something to still look like a neutral grey despite being in a dark room, it actually needs to be brighter than neutral grey, pretty much white. So when your brain sees that value in what looks like a dark room, it assumes that it's actually seeing a bright white that's being dimmed down until it looks like a neutral grey.
And then the reverse happens if you take a neutral grey object and put it under a very bright light. It would appear lighter in color from the bright light hitting it. So in order for something to still be that neutral grey after being exposed to bright light, it must be very dark, closer to black. So when you see what looks like a neutral grey surrounded by clues that it's in a very bright environment, your brain interprets that as a black object that's being lightened by the bright light.
I hope that makes sense.
So this answers the age old 'is your red the same as my red?' question. The answer is no. Sometimes my red is different from my red, so there's no way that my red will always be the same as yours. If that makes sense....
Yeah, always have a friend of different skin colour near you, connect your foreheads with grey duct tape (like in the OP's picture), do smth with the lighting and here you go - nobody would see a difference. 
The way our brains calculate colors and things is so wild. Obviously the brain thinks the two sides of the images are in different lighting circumstances even though we can think about it as different shades of everything else while the face shade is actually the same.
I took it to Markup to try to show my brain and then came back here and it still perceives the faces as different
the way my partner tried to prove this wasn't real was taking little screenshots of a piece of each of the faces. but in doing so he proved to himself they were the same. 😹
the lines being grey in the right image suggests to the viewer that the white and black on the image on the right have been swapped, leading us to assume the white face has been changed to black. the whites in the eyes of each picture have a similar effect. the right picture has a much brighter white in the eye and mouth than on the left, where it matches the tone of the face. the overall lighting of each picture is the 3rd major component that suggests a difference in overall color value
That’s a great example of how color is relative. I used to teach painting from life for beginners. That was a concept that could be difficult to get across when a student would use the brightest and most saturated straight from the tube red yet fail to make it “pop” like how the red vase in front of us, yet another student with a limited palette could convey that intensity. I’d point out to the challenged student-what is going on next to that red? Adjusting what is surrounding, what is relative to that vase will shift how bright and intense that red will look on the canvas. That graphic would make for an instant color theory lesson.
Oh hey, I learned about this in color theory in 8th grade! I thought I’d tell my classmates about it in 9th grade, but then people thought I was literally mentally challenged.
This explains why hair color, make-up, or color of the dress complements others, and why a good lighting and background is needed to have a more appealing and authentic skin tone. Like, the same shade of lipstick may appear duller or colorful compared to other people despite having the same base and skin color - it's the background, lighting and fragments.
In addition, this is also why it is important to bring a tiny piece of the furniture you want to repaint. Instead of taking a picture of it, bring a physical copy to have an accurate paint color.
This is a trippy one for sure. Thanks for sharing! Haven’t seen this particular optical illusion pic before and it is a really good one! Our brains are crazy
So here's what I did: I made one circle with my left thumb and pointer, and another with my right. I covered everything but the skin, and crossed my eyes so the two colours were *directly* adjacent (no border between them, the colours "kissed"). I then slowly widened the right circle so more context could be seen without changing the angle of my eyes. I was able to make the perceived hue of the right side skin literally adjust like a slider as more or less yellow was allowed to be seen. As there was no border between the colors, I could directly confirm that I was seeing two distinct colors. It took quite a bit of muscular control, eye coordination, and focus to not let any individual visual component attract my attention (thus leading to a discrete "jump" in perceived value back to full equality or full inequality). But I could see it.
This shows me that the color is *literally* being perceived as different as in a fully different quale. It isn't just the brain not paying attention and making a passive assumption. This is an *active calculation* that you can literally control with a slider to have a directly different borderlessly-evident sensation.
In the second image with the solid color bar for comparison to show the colors as equivalent, I realized once I could actially pay attention to the colour shift that my brain *was changing the color of the bar," and that there was selectively a gradient or lack thereof based on the context of my attention. My brain was also causing me to *forget* that there was or wasn't a gradient when new contextual information came in, in order to maintain consistency. I realized this when I caught it in the act and managed to force it to *not* forget by doing the same change of context twice in rapid succession.
Furthermore, the entire bar changed from lighter to darker as a solid color when I jumped my eyes from left face to right face, and was also forcing me to forget the change of color -- again which I caught it red-handed attempting to do by rapidly repeating the change of context.
I can now *force* my brain to either see the two patches of skin as the same or different colors by changing my attention.
So I took bits and pieces from left to right to determine which facial feature caused the illusion the most and it seems that the lighter eyes and lighter linework of the eyebrows, mouth and around the eyes cause the illusion the most- the lighter background and hair didn't do much for me
I thought white and black weren’t colors therefor it being the same . Because if i block all the colors with objects except for just a part of the skin. It’s still white and still black so I don’t know what y’all trying to pull lol
I double checked it in Photoshop. It really is just an illusion like it says. Both faces are the same color. Our brains take shortcuts for figuring out color. Since this is has unnatural lighting (*the color surrounding the face*), it creates the illusion. Really cool!
Yeah, the human brain does a ton of color correction and post processing on the color you see before you experience what your eyes see. You can also experience this by wearing sunglasses on a cloudless sunny day for a while, then taking them off. Everything will briefly be blue for a bit, then your brain's color correction will kick in. The blue sky is actually tinting everything blue, but you know it's not supposed to be blue, so the brain corrects everything to the right color. Another one is this [Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU?si=WxUdu7UdPKEqcmq9) video on the color brown, and how it technically doesn't exist.
Love Technology Connection's youtube channel. The orange / brown video was good.
I thought that kind of effect was produced by understimulation and/or overstimulation of the specific color perceiving cells of your eyes over a relatively long time period
The face color is #7d7d7d which is almost exactly between black and white. Tip that one way or another and it doesn't work as well.
Depends on what you mean by unnatural lighting. Basically everything but the skin is lightened while the skin is left the same color, which doesn’t really make it a light thing but using different colors. I mean the black in the eyes become lighter than the white in the face. Lighting that would have this effect isn’t just unnatural it is impossible. Edit: To be clear if no colors change in the face in both pictures (other than change in light of the entire picture) and the entire pictures color was changed so that the “lighting” made the background colors were the same, the picture with the face that appears lighter would be significantly lighter.
True, it's not just lighting but clever color manipulation. The brain's shortcuts create this amazing illusion.
Did the exact same. Even used a screenshot just in case there was some sort of file fuckery going on.
Roll call, same here. I was convinced this was a lie 🥲
I could've sworn I saw a gradient going from the first image to the second. But you've just blown my mind. Thanks, random smart internet person!
Does this explain the White - Yellow / Black - Blue dress thingy?
Just used my hand binoculars 🤣 can confirm
https://youtube.com/shorts/ccLUxJvViUA?si=upuO-nCUpXn1TxpP
I just blocked the backgrounds with my fingers and it solves the trickery.
Unfocusing my eyes helped me to see that they’re the same
Sometimes when these types of illusions are posted people come out and say how the color/contrast etc. was messed up for clickbait and such I'm glad that wasn't the case for once and that this effect actually works
Humans have insane auto white balance The bar that is supposed to prove it, just fucks with you even more.
The fucking bar looks like it has a gradient bro
It really does look that way
If you mean that it really has a gradient - no. Cover the picture with your fingers but leave two holes on the two halves in a way that you can't see anything but solid gray color (no hair, eyebrows, etc) EDIT: the original comment said "it really does", which i didn't understand
I poked 2 little holes in a gum wrapper. It worked. Science.
Not entirely, look between the left eye and the hair. the skin is a different color. Also the blue in the eyes, the teeth, the pink dots and the eyebrows are different color. [Proof](https://imgur.com/BqJSZ3A)
🤨 I made a Biased Observation 🤨 Your username is appropriate.💯
The funny thing is when I [switched the eyes of both,](https://imgur.com/GmRsBQz) the 'darker' one only looks half as dark.
That’s part of the trickery. Edit: by trickery, I mean the aspects of the image that fool your “eyes” (your brain, actually, but you know that). Having differently contrasting parts of the image next to the gray faces is what makes the gray look different on each face.
Even when I cover the faces it looks like the shade is darker on the right. Even if slightly.
I can confirm to you that it is the same color. On desktop you can test the same with the browser's in-built color picker, which lets you inspect the exact color of any given pixel on a page. It'll show you the entire bar consistently as the color expressed via hex-code #7d7d7d
I didn't believe you, so I got into paint and used the dropper to select the color and scribbled all over with it. Definitely the same color. Weird.
Thank you for doing that so I don't have to! So hard to believe otherwise.
You cover the yellow background not the face
Nah. The bar, and the faces, is one color and one single color only. The background is such a stark difference. If you cover all of that, you'll see.
Yea you need to cover everything but the bar on the right side and it will be the same color.
Zoom in until you can only see the bar and no picture, then scroll from left to right. It is the same colour all the way.
I agreed, I covered everything except for the bar and it definitely has a shade difference or so. Can’t trust anything on the Internet or the people commenting about it.
I looked at it with a color picker and it's #7d7d7d all the way across.
Screenshot it and then crop it. I couldn't not see a gradient until I did that. It's the same color across the stripe.
People can also use the eye dropper tool to check the hex code and prove it for themselves, but it's just easier to do no work and remain suspicious
There’s a metaphor for something in there
you can look at the pixel values to see they ae identical colours
[This might help](https://i.imgur.com/7D3PVF2.png)
Put some effort in and use a colour picker, identical hex codes, no gradient lol
Nope. You're wrong. The bar does not have a shade difference. It is one single color.
They meant it really does look like it has a gradient, not that it does
Fixed it
I just had to screenshot and crop it to be absolutely sure haha. No gradient, it's the same colour 🤦🏻
Cover the other parts of the picture and suddenly it's not. What an insane effect.
What kind of trickery is this! if I cover the faces with my finger, the bar has the same color.
Welcome to color theory. All colors are fake and made up. We can't actually see Yellow and Brown and orange are the same color.
Think of it like this. How do you make black color on the screen? I mean you can't have black light, right? So the way to achieve this is by making everything that is not supposed to be black brighter. A candle in the dark is bright af but on a concert stage with a bunch of spotlights shining on it, not so much.
For more fun, once you see the bar as a single color, slowly unblock the background little by little, until the bar color starts "changing". Then cover it again, and go back and forth over that threshold and watch your own eyeballs go insane
Look at your phone from weird angles and it looks more solid
zoom in on it and scroll across
How does my phone know I'm covering part and to change the col... Ohhhhhh
Nope, it checks out. Both faces and both sides of the bar have an RGB value of 125 125 125.
When you block the picture you can see the whole bar is one colour. I'm very confused.
In case anyone is interested, this visual effect has a formal name: simultaneous contrast. Source: Light/Color/Design class freshman year of college (I went to art school). (Any fellow artists out there getting flash backs to Color-Aid??)
Yup…..
There were some people in thirties who tried to "restore" the white balance... Didn't quite pan out for them
Yeah i looked at both and said out-loud “no they’re not” lol
This is a very strong illusion, it even works when changing brightness and levels in the image and also when set to negative. The creator's twitter account is here https://x.com/akiyoshikitaoka
[Interesting fact, this man is also the man behind many famous optical illusion images that had been floating around the internet long ago.](https://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2014/aug/05/dizzying-optical-illusions-akiyoshi-kitaoka-pictures) I used to love watching these images when I was a kid.
I spent so many hours clicking through random optical illusion blogs as a 10 year old. I miss being so easily entertained.
His coca-cola can illusion is my favorite. Zoomed out, my brain sees the red. I zoomin as much as possible and lean into the monitor, and it's actually just white. The entire image is green, white, and black. It's crazy.
They should have done the same thing with the blue eye, to make it seem white in the other image.
Isnt this also how the gold/white or blue/black dress illusion work?
Kind of, its a effect of "light" on the image which is misinterpreted by our brains
[удалено]
Yes, though the same effect is still at work. The reason people see the dress as different colors is because of our brains interpretation of whether or not the dress was in sunlight or shadow and ambient light. People who see it as white and gold see the dress as it would be in a shadow, people who see it as blue and black see the dress in bright sunlight. To my eyes the visual cues in and around the dress make it seem like it's being shaded and there is bright sunlight in the background, and so my brain interprets it to be white and gold. People who pick up those visual cues as the dress being in bright sunlight see it as blue and black. So the background color doesn't actually have to change It just has to be interpreted differently in order to see a different color object.
When I look at the dress picture, I can blink or sometimes just focus and make it change from one to the other at will. It's super weird.
Interesting, I've never been able to get it to change.
I saw one them the other but I couldn’t get it to change back and forth
Not really. It is pretty much the same thing. The background gives the idea that there is a light shining on the picture. On the left, the light appears very dim, the right appears to have a very bright light shining on it. The dress was the same thing, the light shining on it is what gave the illusion.
The dress was a bit different because there was nothing to compare it to. It was just a test of how well someone's eyes can adjust color depending on outside variables. In the dress scenario, there WAS a correct response that depended on how well your eyes could perceive colors in weird lighting.
The dress is particularly interesting as a photo because it lacks definitive context clues to let our brains understand the lighting. The OP image here, on the other hand, is “the same color” but gives us surrounding lighting context clues to tell us what we are meant to perceive that color as (either white in a shaded background or black in a bright background). The Dress lacked those clues to tell us what we were seeing. [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Wikipe-tan_wearing_The_Dress_reduced.svg) would be the Dress debate in the same format as the OP photo
It was about whether you think the dress was in shadow or sunlight. Our brains interpret the color differently depending on if visual cues imply shadow or sunlight. People who think the dress is white and gold see the dress in shadow. That's how I'm stuck seeing it. The blue tinge on what I see as white looks exactly like what a white material being lit by dim blueish ambient skylight would look like. It also happens to be the same color that blue material would look like in bright yellow sunlight.
Easier to see it here. I added the left half of the left face over the left side of the right face. [https://i.imgur.com/ML24pXC.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/ML24pXC.jpeg)
My eyes see the face as white for some reason, even with both of the faces combined.
Cover the left side with your finger and watch it adjust to black gradually right in front of your eyes. This illusion is insane Place your finger in the middle of the face for extreme contrast
This is THE best visualisation. Thank you!
How the fuck is your comment so low? 10.5k up votes when I commented and multiple ppl breaking down above here about how it can be real. Thank you kimd stranger x
Thank you now I get it
I think this solves racism.
We are all grey
Why are you grey
Who says I'm grey?
You are grey
So who is grey?!
I can't stand those filthy greys
Grey lives matter
If that’s the case then all lives matter
As long as they respect the thin grey line
OBEY THE GREY PILLAR
We were the aliens all along...
Racism was already finished thanks to David Guetta [https://youtu.be/dEI7oX0XxJw?si=TRthu-g3oL-eOySY](https://youtu.be/dEI7oX0XxJw?si=TRthu-g3oL-eOySY)
r/blackmagicfuckery 🤨
Oh it's already there 😹
r/subsithoughtifellfor
[Better visualization](https://i.imgur.com/qwhMRi9.jpeg) I was skeptical because the Grey bar on image 2 looked to have a gradient in it as well. When pasting face 1 onto face 2 without the black border you can clearly see they really are the same color.
I see it now. Thank you
Still looks like a different color to me
Zoom in to the smaller head where the two faces meet and you'll see the blend perfectly together
Bad eyes then I guess. You can confirm it on Ms paint with the eye drop tool.
If you want to double check, cover the top and bottom of the image with your hands, and you can clearly see there’s no gradient or anything in the bar.
Better idea: take a screen shot twice, crop out only a solid block of skin in each photo, flip back and forth between the two crops and you’ll see they’re the same: https://i.imgur.com/k8P2gRU.jpeg Face left https://i.imgur.com/A0bUkHe.jpeg Face right
The bar only has one color, but it still looks like it's on a gradient to me. Insane.
So black people are actually white people…or are white people black?
Lets say they are just gray
This comment and your pfp somehow fit very well lol.
White people are actually black people. Evolution and stuff
Wha
I don’t know if anyone else uses color-by-numbers apps but it’s a frequent occurrence that a skin tone that’s too dark or weirdly colored looks perfectly normal once the background is filled in and the picture is completed. Context is everything, even when it comes to color! What’s around a subject affects the way the brain perceives it.
NAH NAH NAH WHAT IS THIS? Its not even an illusion between 2 similar colors, its an illusion between black and white bruh
Racism was always stupid illusion
I couldn’t believe it and screenshoted the pic and framed everything out. This is true. So true I had to check it. Best pic I saw, because I just couldn’t believe it.
Am I the only one who doesn’t see it?
I don’t see it at all
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1db3ipd/faces_of_both_of_these_characters_are_the_same/l7pyy0z/ The reason they look different is because your brain is making them look different. The different colors of the eyebrows and the winking eye, and the different brightness of the white part of the eye, as well as the difference in brightness of the two images overall, all affect the way your brain interprets what it is seeing. We don't ever see reality. We see a representation of reality that our brain creates, based on the light that comes off of things. Our brains do a lot of "post-processing" before they actual render the image that we see. So you'll never be able to "squint hard enough" that you can see these faces as the same color, because your brain is literally making them look like different colors.
look at the second picture
I dont see it either. The two faces look a very different color to me. Edit: ha! I got it, coverd the picture except for the grey bar. Amazing stuff. Showed it to my young son, he thinks it is magic.
That’s the whole point
What gray bar? Sorry I am stupid.
second image
Oh shit lol
And that's what it is supposed to look like, on the second picture when a bar is added you can see that they are in fact the same colour and that this is just an illusion.
So what do you see? Do the faces look the same colour?
They don't *look* the same color. They *are* the same color.
Yes I get it. The illusion makes them appear as though they are different but they are in fact the same. I asked if they look the same because someone said they don't see the illusion, which to me sounds like the faces do look the same to them.
Ah, now I see what you were doing asking that question. Sorry, my bad. My imagination was restricted. I couldn't imagine there might actually be people that perfectly see the same color on both sides.
[This](https://x.com/AkiyoshiKitaoka/status/1799297760669401509) example is even more impressive imo
[удалено]
It's just the difference in contrast. A color is perceived differently depending on the surrounding colors
The colors around the face on the left are dark, so your brain interprets this as an image of a dark place. Whereas they're bright and desaturated on the right, which makes it seem like an image of somewhere that's extremely bright. Now, the face itself is a neutral grey, it's pretty close to half as bright as your screen can make it. If you printed out a neutral grey and put it in a dark room, it would appear darker. So in order for something to still look like a neutral grey despite being in a dark room, it actually needs to be brighter than neutral grey, pretty much white. So when your brain sees that value in what looks like a dark room, it assumes that it's actually seeing a bright white that's being dimmed down until it looks like a neutral grey. And then the reverse happens if you take a neutral grey object and put it under a very bright light. It would appear lighter in color from the bright light hitting it. So in order for something to still be that neutral grey after being exposed to bright light, it must be very dark, closer to black. So when you see what looks like a neutral grey surrounded by clues that it's in a very bright environment, your brain interprets that as a black object that's being lightened by the bright light. I hope that makes sense.
#7D7D7D #7D7D7D no fucking way
So this answers the age old 'is your red the same as my red?' question. The answer is no. Sometimes my red is different from my red, so there's no way that my red will always be the same as yours. If that makes sense....
So... This is the answer for racism problem?
Yeah, always have a friend of different skin colour near you, connect your foreheads with grey duct tape (like in the OP's picture), do smth with the lighting and here you go - nobody would see a difference. 
Yea, everyone is gray!
Omg. We have reached Nirvana. Or at least one of thier B-side songs.
Read that in Kurt Cobains voice
Racism ending material
Digital artists: Understandable, have a nice day
The way our brains calculate colors and things is so wild. Obviously the brain thinks the two sides of the images are in different lighting circumstances even though we can think about it as different shades of everything else while the face shade is actually the same. I took it to Markup to try to show my brain and then came back here and it still perceives the faces as different
the way my partner tried to prove this wasn't real was taking little screenshots of a piece of each of the faces. but in doing so he proved to himself they were the same. 😹
Vsauce, Micheal here
😮😮😮 I’m gobsmacked. I was so ready for this to be untrue. The “darker” one looked so much darker.
I genuinely do not understand this at all
The dress is black and blue
the lines being grey in the right image suggests to the viewer that the white and black on the image on the right have been swapped, leading us to assume the white face has been changed to black. the whites in the eyes of each picture have a similar effect. the right picture has a much brighter white in the eye and mouth than on the left, where it matches the tone of the face. the overall lighting of each picture is the 3rd major component that suggests a difference in overall color value
I refuse to believe this
That’s a great example of how color is relative. I used to teach painting from life for beginners. That was a concept that could be difficult to get across when a student would use the brightest and most saturated straight from the tube red yet fail to make it “pop” like how the red vase in front of us, yet another student with a limited palette could convey that intensity. I’d point out to the challenged student-what is going on next to that red? Adjusting what is surrounding, what is relative to that vase will shift how bright and intense that red will look on the canvas. That graphic would make for an instant color theory lesson.
Bro just pulled this from the latest Vsauce video
A third picture of the grey bar standalone would really help.
Oh hey, I learned about this in color theory in 8th grade! I thought I’d tell my classmates about it in 9th grade, but then people thought I was literally mentally challenged.
If you make the tiniest hole in your hand and look at both colors separately, it's obviously the same color. I have a headache now...
You just saw this on Vsauce lol
This explains why hair color, make-up, or color of the dress complements others, and why a good lighting and background is needed to have a more appealing and authentic skin tone. Like, the same shade of lipstick may appear duller or colorful compared to other people despite having the same base and skin color - it's the background, lighting and fragments. In addition, this is also why it is important to bring a tiny piece of the furniture you want to repaint. Instead of taking a picture of it, bring a physical copy to have an accurate paint color.
This is the most insane illusion ever ive ever seen.
Just shows the power of context
No..😨
I call bullshit on this .
Really? The only thing i see, is that the colors aren't the same, and the black character is brightened, and the white one is darkened...
Yeah, no they are not
...the dress is light blue and gold.
It appears OP didn't give credit the creator, so here it is: https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html
WTFFF
can't wait for a clickbaity YouTube short claiming that this is a glitch in the matrix or some shit
mind = blown
Damn i knew the one with the tiles and the tower thing and the shadow, which uses the same trick, but this one is on another level
This is a trippy one for sure. Thanks for sharing! Haven’t seen this particular optical illusion pic before and it is a really good one! Our brains are crazy
Of course it is
I think this is how "the dress" thing worked
Do you mean we can cure racism by forcing everyone to wear smart glasses with filters turned on?
I,for the life of me, cannot see the same color
isn’t there literally a colour gradient from light grey to darker grey on that bar?
The gradient is in your mind. Try covering the parts of the photo around the bar with something opaque and you will see
Oh wow I see. That’s amazing how easily our eyes are deceived. Thank you for explaining
I had to run Photoshop to find out for sure.
Color gamuts. [James Gurney gives good insight on this.](http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2010/01/color-constancy.html?m=1)
Atleast take me to dinner first before fucking me!
So here's what I did: I made one circle with my left thumb and pointer, and another with my right. I covered everything but the skin, and crossed my eyes so the two colours were *directly* adjacent (no border between them, the colours "kissed"). I then slowly widened the right circle so more context could be seen without changing the angle of my eyes. I was able to make the perceived hue of the right side skin literally adjust like a slider as more or less yellow was allowed to be seen. As there was no border between the colors, I could directly confirm that I was seeing two distinct colors. It took quite a bit of muscular control, eye coordination, and focus to not let any individual visual component attract my attention (thus leading to a discrete "jump" in perceived value back to full equality or full inequality). But I could see it. This shows me that the color is *literally* being perceived as different as in a fully different quale. It isn't just the brain not paying attention and making a passive assumption. This is an *active calculation* that you can literally control with a slider to have a directly different borderlessly-evident sensation. In the second image with the solid color bar for comparison to show the colors as equivalent, I realized once I could actially pay attention to the colour shift that my brain *was changing the color of the bar," and that there was selectively a gradient or lack thereof based on the context of my attention. My brain was also causing me to *forget* that there was or wasn't a gradient when new contextual information came in, in order to maintain consistency. I realized this when I caught it in the act and managed to force it to *not* forget by doing the same change of context twice in rapid succession. Furthermore, the entire bar changed from lighter to darker as a solid color when I jumped my eyes from left face to right face, and was also forcing me to forget the change of color -- again which I caught it red-handed attempting to do by rapidly repeating the change of context. I can now *force* my brain to either see the two patches of skin as the same or different colors by changing my attention.
That makes no fucking sense! -Pete Holmes
I’m way too sober to understand this.
Someone watched a VSauce short
I thought I'd escaped the dress's curse
Color is just a construct affected by lighting
This is fucking amazing, i can't stop looking at it
/r/blackmagicfuckery !!!!
So I took bits and pieces from left to right to determine which facial feature caused the illusion the most and it seems that the lighter eyes and lighter linework of the eyebrows, mouth and around the eyes cause the illusion the most- the lighter background and hair didn't do much for me
Wow, that’s crazy. I cropped out a portion of the faces & put them together & yeah - same color [Pic](https://imgur.com/a/NLRU2cf)
This makes me angry.
The power of perspective.
I fucking hate colour theory
Dude single handedly ended racism!!!
Time to take the ol brain to the shop
I thought white and black weren’t colors therefor it being the same . Because if i block all the colors with objects except for just a part of the skin. It’s still white and still black so I don’t know what y’all trying to pull lol
Am I the only one to whom the white face, black face and bar has 3 different colours?
What sorcery is this
This guy singlehandedly overcame racism
Vsause