In February of 2015, Paul Jinx and his then-girlfriend Cecilia Blee's Dale were shopping at an outlet mall near Liverpool, England.

Cecilia was looking for something in particular, a blue dress to wear to her daughter's wedding.

She found these three dresses, all blue, and she said, I don't know, I don't know which one. So she goes, I know, I'm going to take a picture of each and send them to a daughter of grace.

Paul held up the three dresses in turn and Cecilia took a picture of each of them with her cell phone. And then she texted all three photos to her daughter.

Yeah, they all look alright, but I thought you said they're all blue. They said, well, they are. And she's going, what, I fared 27? It was girls and white.

Paul was holding the dress in question in his hands as these texts were coming in. It was undoubtedly a royal blue dress with black lace detailing.

Then Cecilia held up her phone to me, she says, what cool is that? I went, oh, it does look good on white in the picture. And that's where it started from.

This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. In the history of viral images, the dress has got to be in the top 10. This unassuming photograph of a party dress kicked off a global, what the hell when people realized they were seeing it completely differently.

In today's episode, we're going down the optical rabbit hole known as the dress. We'll watch it achieve global infamy, burrow into how it works with a scientist who's been studying it for years and explore the unexpectedly big questions it raises about what is true and how we know it.

So today on Dakota Ring, why do we see different colors when we look at the dress? And why does it matter?

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Okay, so the photo of the dress is now on two cell phones Cecilia bleeds ails and her daughters and I want to stick with it as it begins to make its way out into the world.

It's first stop was Facebook or Cecilia's daughter Grace posted it soon after receiving it from her mother. There was a lot of chatter about it, but it stayed contained.

She was living on a Scottish island. So basically stayed on the island soon after Grace is wedding though a friend posted the image to tumblr.

It was Thursday February 26th 2015 like late afternoon Buzzfeed got a message.

Kate's Holderness is now the head of editorial at tumblr, but at the time she was a community moderator at Buzzfeed and she also ran all of the site's tumblr accounts.

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