Mind-bending illusion will have you convinced you know the colour of this woman’s eyes – but the truth is shocking
A SERIAL illusionist has shared a video which reveals how a woman with grey eyes appears to have blue irises.
The trick was shared on TikTok by serial illusionist Dean Jackson, or @beatonthebeeb, who explains how it works.
In the video Mr Jackson said: “Your brain detects the pigment – the grey 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 colour back into the picture for you, and your brain is completely misleading you in the process.”
Behind the eye photoreceptors react to the light as it shines through.
If the brain recognises the context of the image as blue, grey light can appear to be blue.
But if we then zoom in on the image, we will recognise that the blue is actually grey.
Mr Jackson gave another example of this point in a video, where he showed an image of a grey Coke can covered with stripes of a cyan filter.
The stripes with the filter appear red because your eye expects it to be, despite the cyan filter blocking out all red light.
The grey stripes without the filter also look red because of the principle of ‘colour constancy’.
This is the phenomenon that allows our eyes and brains to perceive something to be the same colour under different lighting conditions.
However this ability can be tricked, and can make a colour appear different if it neighbours another one.
In this case, a cyan stripe next to a grey stripe can make the grey appear red.