“Raise your hand if you have ever felt personally victimized by #thedress.”

This tweet from @missguided basically sums up the ongoing conversations of Feb. 26 and 27.

Yes, this is about THE dress. The one that’s black and blue. This dress and it’s ‘changing’ colors has baffled people across the world in half a day, and has become viral in 24 hours.

It’s claimed to be the dress that “broke the internet” as it appeared late Thursday Feb. 26 on social media sites such as Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram, and by Friday Feb. 27 was on CNN.

The source of all this madness? Caitlin McNeill, a Scottish musician, who’s soon-to-be-wed friends were the first people EVER to disagree on the color scheme of this dress. The bride’s mother had sent the picture to her daughter that would leave families and friends bickering over disagreements.

McNeill uploaded the picture to her Tumblr, @swiked, on Thursday Feb. 26, and it exploded from there.

So why on earth does this dress seem to be white and gold to some people and blue and black to others?

It all has to do with our retinas reacting to light levels and mixing colors.

So to sum up the scientific side of how this dress appears two different ways, our retinas receive the light that bounces off objects and then relays that light to the visual cortex, which is the part of our brains that processes the signals of light from the retinas into actual images. Your brain deducts what colors of light are bouncing off the object and you think “yellow” or “red”. Basically, we all see different shades of color because our retinas react differently, but usually it’s the same color we see, not two completely opposite ones.

And somehow, this picture seems to hit a sweet spot of light that can’t be interpreted as one color to every individual. Our eyes mix the colors red, green and blue to reach the conclusion of other colors such as purple or orange. This dress is interpreted differently by different people because some people’s brains ignore the blue colors of the dress, which leads to them seeing white and gold. Other people’s brains ignore the gold side, which leads them to see blue and black.

If you took a small cutout of a portion of the dress from the top colored stripe and looked at it without the influence of the rest of the dress, the lighting, the background, and the play of other colors on your brain, you would see blue.

Simply, the dress appears different colors to different people because every individual’s brain interprets color and light differently.

One thing that isn’t so hard to grasp though: those who think it’s white and gold are wrong.