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Shop manager Debbie Armstrong adjusts a two tone dress in a window display of a shop in Lichfield, England, Friday Feb. .27, 2015. It's the dress that's beating the Internet black and blue. Or should that be gold and white? Friends and co-workers worldwide are debating the true hues of a royal blue dress with black lace that, to many an eye, transforms in one photograph into gold and white (AP Photo/Rui Vieira

KENTWOOD, MI -- The heated debate over the hues of The Dress that went viral last month on social media has benefitted color products maker X-Rite Inc.

Thousands have flocked to the website of the Kentwood-based company for a color vision test after an oddly-lit photo of the striped dress has some seeing a blue and black dress, and others a white and gold one -- the debate spawned an Internet hashtag #thedress.

"We actually saw a fairly big increase in our traffic to our website where you can take an online visual test, the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test color test," said Shoshana Burgett, X-Rite's director of worldwide marketing. "It's actually a product we sell but we offer an online version to kind of help educate people on the value of color and the way everybody sees color."

X-Rite's website had upwards of 300,000 people take the online test in the wake of a last month's international debate about the color of striped dress.

The 15-minute test analyzes how people see color. Those who take it are asked to arrange rows of color swatches by hue to test their ability to distinguish subtle differences in color. The lower score, the higher the color acuity. Top score is a 0, and the lowest score is a 99.

But don't take the results too much to heart because the accuracy of the online test is tied to the color calibration of the monitor and how light is hitting the screen.

"It's more a fun representation of the actual physical test," said Molly McDermott Walsh, spokeswoman for Pantone, the color standards division of X-Rite Inc, and the selectors of the Color of the Year.

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Beyond the surge in web traffic, employees at X-Rite and Pantone, were fielding questions from friends and family who wanted their expertise.

"I think it put us in the forefront of the conversation," said Burgett. "You are talking to everybody who understands the basics of color but had no idea why they were seeing the differences and I think that everybody was trying to understand and explain that."

Walsh describes the overexposed photo of the blue and black dress where some viewers saw white and gold as a perfect storm of bad lighting conditions. X-Rite sells products to help photographers avoid those mistakes.

X-Rite's online color test takes about 15 minutes to complete. A perfect score is a 0.

But eye experts describe the photo as a one-in-a-million shot that perfectly captures how people's brains perceive color and process contrast in dramatically different ways.

"This photo provides the best test I've ever seen for how the process of color correction works in the brain,'" Daniel Hardiman-McCartney, the clinical adviser to Britain's College of Optometrists told the Associated Press. "I've never seen a photo like before where so many people look at the same photo and see two sets of such dramatically different colors."

Even X-Rite Color Scientist Edward Hattenberger wasn't immune.

When he first saw the image, the dress appeared blue and black. The next morning it was white and gold, and it has remained that color for him. But the colors continue to change for his daughter.

"Because there is a little bit of background information that shows the image is overexposed, your brain is trying to determine whether the image is actually illuminated by a bright yellowish light, which would make it blue and black or ... the lighting on the dress is actually dim and bluish, then the dress appears white and gold," Hattenberger explains.

While The Dress has raised X-Rite's profile, it is too soon to tell if the exposure will brighten the financial results of publicly traded parent company, Danaher Corporation.

"It definitely opened the door for educating everybody about color, about how you view it and how you perceive it," said Burgett. "It was definitely interesting to see the conversations."

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As of now, there are no plans to turn The Dress into a commercial or marketing campaign.

"Stuff like this going viral usually hits a very quick peak and then trails down very quickly, which is why talking about the dress two months from now will probably be when people have moved onto the next viral thing," Burgett said.

Shandra Martinez covers business for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email her or follow her on Twitter @shandramartinez.