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Lama Hajj

#TheDress Meltdown Describes How Lebanese Women Feel When They’re Getting Their Nails Done

On Thursday, two llamas escaped from a mobile petting zoo in Arizona and engaged the local police in a three-hour chase before being caught. They were adorable, and we salute their spirits.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the internet, the world collectively lost its mind over the color of a dress, an ugly dress, might I add. It all started when a Tumblr user posted a picture of said dress noting that she and her friends were unable to agree on whether it was white and gold or blue and black. Apparently, neither could the rest of the world. This sparked a huge debate on Twitter with more than 560,000 people across the globe tweeting about #TheDress.

Of course, Lebanese people were dragged into the debate being the fashion experts that they are. I bet some Instagram fashionista only has to glance at that dress for three seconds before telling us the make, the designer, and color of the dress. In fact, Lebanese women are so particular about colors that I once had a friend describe her wedding dress as a “mélange between ivory, eggshell, and Navajo white” – it looked pretty white to me, like teeth or…clouds.

Now you know how Lebanese women feel when they’re trying to get their nails done. “No, that’s not red, that’s an orange…no, that’s more of a fuchsia, get it together!” Many a time I have tried to achieve a “sexy and fiery red” only to end up with a “creepy stepdad’s fantasy pink” nail color.

Lebanon’s own Elissa nipped the discussion in the bud:

The debate then extended to the statistically lowest IQ/highest ego area in the world, where Kim Kardashian and her balanced husband, Kanye West, weighed in on the matter:

It wasn’t long before everybody was questioning their sanity and calling their ophthalmologist. Take Anna Kendrick, for example. She was on the verge of a breakdown:

Some internet users even took it upon themselves to use Adobe Photoshop in an attempt to determine what colors the dress was:

Finally, science came to the rescue and weighed in by explaining that the different colors people are seeing are the result of a white-balance optical illusion, which is when our eyes are tricked by the context of what we’re looking at. To clarify, Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College said, “[Y]our visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis …[s]o people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.”

The one thing science still hasn’t explained is why a bunch of strangers on the internet got so passionately enraged over the color of a dress.

As of now, #TeamBlueandBlack is winning the debate, but #TeamWhiteandGold is not backing down. Here’s what I learned today: truth is subjective, up is down, black is white, and you should give your Lebanese manicurist a break.