While half of people see the shoes as pink and white in the picture, the other half are convinced these trainers are grey and a shade of green or blue. “Everyone has a very strong prior belief that shoelaces are white. This theory seems to check out. There seems to be two groups of people when it comes to the correct answer — some thing that the shoe is pink and white, while others says it’s grey and aqua. If your brain thinks the shoe is more illuminated, you see it as pink. “No joke it was pink and white and then I looked at it again and it was grey and blue wtf,” a woman said. As we explained previously about the dress illusion, when you look at the photo of the shoe, your brain is actually interpreting the background lighting in the photo. So when your visual system sees the manipulated photograph, where the shoe laces are a weird turquoise, it then subtracts that color from the rest of the scene, restoring the canvas of the shoe to pink,” Conway said. When we ran the first the image through Photoshop, it recognized the shoes as teal and gray. If your brain thinks it’s more reflective (it’s in shadows), then the shoe appears to be teal. "It's originally pink & white, the flash & bad quality camera is what makes [sic] appear teal & grey or pink & white," one person wrote. They were apparently her friend's shoes and the whole discussion stirred up when her mother thought that the shoes were grey and blue.