I am not positive that the so-called chimerical colours aren’t an explanation of that dress and the phenomena doesn’t truly strike me as an optical illusion and something more akin to a more intense exercise than one subjects his or her eyes to, but nonetheless catching a fleeting glimpse of the stygian colours—that is something both dark and super-saturated, is something to behold. There are other flavours of colours outside the visual gamut, what can be displayed, reproduced, or seen due to the structure of our eyes or even imagined in the conventional sense, but these contrasting hues and resultant impossible blue are suggestive of the mythological river Styx that separated the world of the living from the underworld.
To achieve the effect, one ought to stare at the target within the yellow circle for a full minute, then glance over the black square. Staring at the bright spot fatigues certain colour and light receptors (not like an after-image burnt into a television screen) and then those receptors that are used primarily to boost night-vision are excited, and one should briefly see the contradictory spectre. Maybe some have the ability to see such things everywhere—although the concept of colours can be communicated to an extent, I suppose we never know what another person perceives, and there was probably also a time not too long ago when unnatural colours like hot-pink or the florescent- and neon-tinged ones were unheard of and novel. Other descriptors include luminous and hyperbolic, and I think it would be fun to give names to that whole spectrum of overlapping colours and challenge our brains and eyes to see the impossible. Are these chimera colours—like the hot, bitter, baby and shocking, once seen unable to be unseen or must they be conjured up every time?
