"What colour is the dress?" has now been added to the list of the world's greatest questions, which include, "Who killed J.R. Ewing?", "When will global poverty end?" and, "Why do we want to keep up with Kardashians so much?"
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According to Google, as of Friday at 11.24am AEDT, the topic of "white and gold" had eclipsed our interest in the Prime Minister.
"Not since Monica Lewinsky was a White House intern has one blue dress been the source of so much consternation," is how Wired magazine summed up Friday's #dressgate.
While the science bible declared the lace bandage dress as blue in an article titled "The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Colour of This Dress", local academics and colour recognition specialists are more Team White and Gold but say it's all about the context and on what device you are viewing the original, low-resolution photo of the frock.
University of Sydney's College of Fine Arts colour theory lecturer Dr Zena O'Connor said the perception of colour is like the beginning of a relationship – ambiguous, with a few grey areas.
"The perception of colour is always open to variation depending on ambient lighting as well as the labels [the name of colours] that people assign to the colours that they're viewing. In addition, each digital device (such as computer screens, printers, etc) have a marginally different colour gamut, an internal gismo for colour and this can distort the appearance of colour creating havoc in all sorts of different contexts," she said.
Dr Simon Cropper, a senior researcher from the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences, also has some bad news for the black and blue crew.
"Colour, in particular, is incredibly context sensitive in terms of how you perceive it. It depends on what's surrounding the colour, what the illuminate is, what the texture is and sometimes what the material is, as in what the thing is. So that's why it sets it up for all sorts of disagreements," he said.
Dr Cropper and his PhD students are now adding this image to the list of great internet illusions.
"This particular one is also confounded by the fact that it's a photograph presented with a relatively low resolution on multiple displays, on multiple viewing devices, in multiple different environments across the entire internet.
"If that dress were in front of you now there would be no arguments about what colour it is. It would be gold and white and that white would have a bluish and greyishness to it because whites often do to make them appear whiter so they put a bit of blue into white to kind of give them that whiteness. Because it's in a photograph, very strongly backlit by sunlight and next to it is a black and white print it sets up enough noise for how the image is represented."
But there's the rub.
The person responsible for the photograph has confirmed the dress is, as Kanye West and Taylor Swift said, black and blue.
Twenty-year-old musician Caitlin McNeill, who lives on the Scottish island of Colonsay, posted the original photo on Tumblr after opinion was divided on Facebook when her friend uploaded the image of the dress her mother wore to her wedding.
Her band played at the wedding where she actually saw the dress and told Business Insider what colour the dress was in reality.
"I got to the wedding and the mother was wearing the dress," McNeill said. "Obviously it was blue and black.
"I thought my followers on Tumblr would maybe have a good reaction, but I never would have considered that Taylor Swift and Mindy Kaling would be tweeting about it."
Reaction to the reaction of the dress is now the topic of the sartorial saga on social media.
