Optical Illusion Shows Woman With Blue Eyes… But Are They Really?

Upon first glance at the image of a woman’s eyes, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t think they’re blue. However, it turns out there in fact isn’t any blue in the image at all, and this is all just a baffling optical illusion.

This phenomenon recently went viral online when popular biologist Dr Dean Jackson posted a video explaining the science behind the mind-bending photograph.

In the video, Jackson explained that by placing a red filter over a black-and-white picture of a woman, we perceive her eyes to be blue in color. But in actuality, it’s impossible for the blue light to pass through the red tint.

@beatonthebeeb Are her eyes blue? ##opticalillusion##opticalillusions##mindgame##mindgames ##colours##complementarycolors ♬ original sound - Dean Jackson

Instead, the woman’s eyes are gray—just like before the filter was placed—and our brains have simply invented the bright blue we appear to see whenever we look at her pupils.

“Your brain detects the pigment—the gray area around the pupil—and it assumes that the red filter has trapped the blue light. So it tries to help you out, as your brain should, by putting the blue color back into the picture for you,” he said.

To further illustrate, here’s what the color picker shows in our recreation of the eye-trick.

This definitely isn’t the first type our brain has led us astray. From the Major League Baseball logo to an animation on which bus is moving more quickly, it seems there are times our eyes can’t discern fact from fiction.

[via PetaPixel and Creative Bloq, images via Gabriel Blaj | Dreamstime.com]