Eye Shadow Optical Illusion

This Japanese manga girl by professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka looks like she has one cyan eye and one gray eye. In fact, both eyes are exactly the same shade of gray. The proof can be seen right next to the original. The girl’s right eye appears the same as the turquoise hair clip, only because of the reddish context. Scientific American explains this optical illusion in following words: “Part of the process of seeing color is that three different kinds of photoreceptors in the eye are tuned to three overlapping families of color: red, green and blue (which are activated by visible light of long, medium and short wavelengths). These signals are then instantaneously compared with signals from nearby regions in the same scene. As the signals are passed along to higher and higher processing centers in the brain, they continue to be compared with larger and larger swaths of the surrounding scene. This “opponent process,” as scientists call it, means that color and brightness are always relative.”

16 Replies to “Eye Shadow Optical Illusion”

  1. Blue pixels –

    sorry there are actually blue pixels in the girl’s right eye and there are not any in the girl’s left eye. Copy the image into an image editor, crop out each eye and zoom in. The jpeg compression algorithm apparently throws in the some blue pixels. It is possible that the original image contained solid gray fields for both eyes, but the above image does not.

    1. Take an editing program, use the dropper tool to copy the grey shade in the grey eye, then fill in the apparent blue eye, it still looks blue.

    2. Even with covering up the original picture, so I can only see the eyes, the one eye is blue. Cover up the barrette, they eye is STILL blue. STARE at the whole image, except the barrette, and once again…the eye is blue. *le gasp*

      Fail.

      Try with another image…

    3. Also…why would her eye be the only thing blue?…her top is grey, too..so why isn’t the other half blue?…

  2. If that explanation were true, the girl’s grey shirt would also be blue since it’s the same shade of grey as her eye.

  3. It is real.
    both eyes are the color #7e7e7e. If you think the extra pixels mean anything, try coloring it in with #7e7e7e and it won’t matter.

    The shirt doesn’t look blue because it has a red masking over it, the eye doesn’t. That’s the whole point.

  4. It is real.
    both eyes are the color #7e7e7e. If you think the extra pixels mean anything, try coloring it in with #7e7e7e and it won’t matter.

    The shirt doesn’t look blue because it has a red masking over it, the eye doesn’t. That’s the whole point.

  5. the one eye does have blue spots in it, but when you color both eyes in the shade of gray it still has a bluish tint, just not as much as the hairclip color.

  6. It isn’t fake. I have edited in fireworks (photo editing program) and have achieved the same effect easily. The two eyes are the exact same colour.

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  8. u just need to put ur fingers around the eye on the left and u will see it grey not blue.. its how your brain interprets color, dont say they’re different

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