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Returning from the show after the entire thing had essentially played itself out made me feel like an alien on my own planet. Somehow, I had missed an entire cycle of memefication, "debate," reposting, recrimination, and regret—which was, actually, a pretty nice place to be. Then I went to bed.Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.Even WIRED's own photo team—driven briefly into existential spasms of despair by how many of them saw a white-and-gold dress—eventually came around to the contextual, color-constancy explanation. "I initially thought it was white and gold," says Neil Harris, our senior photo editor. "When I attempted to white-balance the image based on that idea, though, it didn't make any sense." He saw blue in the highlights, telling him that the white he was seeing was blue, and the gold was black. And when Harris reversed the process, balancing to the darkest pixel in the image, the dress popped blue and black. "It became clear that the appropriate point in the image to balance from is the black point," Harris says.