As war in Syria and Ukraine raged, the threat of global warming hung over humanity, and Europe teetered on the brink of economic crisis, Chinese Net users Friday joined the international community in arguing about whether a picture of a dress posted on tumblr was white with gold lace fringe or blue with black lace fringe.

Netizens on various social media launched surveys on the color of the dress.

About 80 percent of the respondents on a Sina Weibo survey chose white with gold, and 20 percent chose blue with black.

A previous survey on the US website buzzfeed.com showed that 75 percent of the users saw white and gold, and the other 25 percent saw the dress as blue and black. 

"I almost had a fight with my mum who disagreed with me on the color of the dress," one netizen wrote.

Some netizens claimed they first saw it in white and gold, but later it was in blue and black. Some even criticized the dress was too ugly, which did not deserve much attention.

Apart from madly arguing about the color of the dress, Chinese online also desperately tried to figure out what caused their disagreement.

Ye Yufeng, an ophthalmologist with Hangzhou First People's Hospital in Zhejiang Province, told the news portal hangzhou.com.cn that visual cone cells define people's ability in differentiating colors, but different people have a different proportion of cone cells in their retinas, which explained why people see the dress as different colors.

 Chinese media outlets also posted pictures of the dress in both white with gold and blue with black, trying to explain how people's visual illusions resulted in their disagreement on the color of the dress.