Think you’ve got eagle eyes? This brainteaser, considered one of the most famous optical illusions of all time, will put them to the test – and it’s already left many people stumped
People have been left baffled by a world-famous optical illusion featuring two women – with many people declaring they can only see one. The pencil drawing appears to show a young woman wearing an elaborate hat and veil and facing away from the viewer. The subject of the image also sports a feathered coat and choker and has cropped curly hair.
However, the picture also features an older woman who is a little harder to pick out. Taking to Reddit, brainteaser fans discussed the image in the hopes of working out where the second woman could be found.
Posting the puzzle, one confused fan wrote: “Apparently there is an old lady and a young lady. But i can only see the young one.”
However, others were quick to point out how to spot the second woman. “The chin is the old lady’s nose,” one wrote. A second chimed in: “The ear is the old lady’s eye.”
“The necklace is the old lady’s mouth,” added a third. “She looks like baba yaga,” another joked.
However, other puzzle fans came up against another problem. “I can only see the old lady,” one wrote, while others were still left stumped even after having the brainteaser explained to them. “Somehow I still don’t see it,” one said.
The mind-bending artwork, titled My Wife and My Mother-in-Law, was drawn by cartoonist William Ely Hill and first published in the now-defunct US humour magazine Puck in November 1915, alongside the caption: “They are both in this picture – Find them.”
But the puzzle shot to fame in 1930 when American psychologist Edwin Boring wrote about the image in a paper titled “A new ambiguous figure”. It has since been dubbed the Boring Figure as a result and has featured in a number of experiments and textbooks in the 109 years since its publication.
