In February of 2015, Paul Jinx and his then-girlfriend Cecilia Blesdale 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 door 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 all right, but I thought you said they're all blue.

I said, well, they are.

And she's going, what, a third, 27 was gold 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?

Oh, it does look like gold and 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?

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