Years ago my daughter told me about some glasses that would correct color blindness so I went online to find out about them and of course to check prices. She told me she had watched several videos in which people had put on the glasses and burst into tears because of the beauty they saw for the first time. At that point in time it just didn’t seem that important to me, maybe because it was just too new, and I thought the prices seemed high. But then Ginny, a blogging friend, recently sent me an article that told how National Parks, Museums, Libraries, and other public places were loaning color correcting glasses to the public. So again I went online and found some for $119.00. and that’s what you see above, sitting on their cleaning cloth. They have titanium frames and titanium is just one of seven different coatings on the lenses.
Just so you know, I’m not promoting the Pilestone Company and I’m not receiving any kickbacks from them; they just happen to be the company I chose to do business with. There are others, so if you’re interested you really should shop around. You can spend more if you wish.
So the package arrived from Pennsylvania and I excitedly put the glasses on and said Pink?? I’m going to see the world tinted pink?? What you see above is a photo looking through a lens at a white piece of paper and yes, they really are that color. But they’re that color because that is the color that corrects my particular form of color blindness. Other forms of color blindness need different colored lenses. I’ve seen others that looked blue.
If I understand what I’ve read correctly there are outdoor and indoor lenses because of the difference in the quality of light. Inside when I put them on everything turned pink, so I couldn’t wait to get outside and see if that changed. But then it snowed, and the world went back to black and white. One day impatience got the better of me and I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer, so I went out with them on.
I’ll admit that I was highly skeptical about the glasses because of the pink color but I have to say, when I went outside I found out why the people in those videos were crying, because it was almost as if I was back in the 60s and had taken LSD. What I saw was amazing; everything was sharper, crisper, and colors glowed. It was as if all the colors had become children and here I was, on their playground. They laughed and shouted and were more alive than I had ever seen them. And nothing, not even the snow, was pink. The red of a stop sign looked more like what I’ve always thought of as orange. In fact all the different reds I looked at leaned towards my idea of orange, but one of those ugly blue plastic tarps was so intensely BLUE! it was if I could have seen it from miles away. The yellow on a business sign shouted look at me! They were all old friends but with fresh new faces, and even last year’s dead oak and beech leaves came alive and seemed to vibrate. Life “popped” is the only way I can describe it, and so I wandered around raising and lowering the glasses as if in a daze. I’m very anxious to see flowers now.
I would say, if you happen to be color blind, that you really should give these glasses a try. If they don’t work for you, you get your money back so there is nothing to lose. There is no cure for color blindness so it is color correcting glasses, contacts, or color blindness, period. You start by choosing a company that offers the glasses, and then you take a simple online test.
I think we’ve probably all seen some version of this test for color blindness, most likely as school children. What I see here is an easily seen number 16 in the upper right corner and a kind of vague, less easily seen number 8 in the lower left. For me, all other circles have no numbers in them, and I think it was in fourth or fifth grade that I first failed a color blindness test and was told that I was color blind. You can take a similar, more extensive test online now at many different websites. The following results are what I saw after taking the test online at the Pilestone Company website:
Dichromats: Deuteranopia (also called green-blind). In this case the medium wavelength sensitive cones (green) are missing. A deuteranope can only distinguish 2 to 3 different hues, whereas somebody with normal vision sees 7 different hues.
Anomalous Trichromats: Deuteranomaly (green-weak). This can be everything between almost normal color vision and deuteranopia. The green sensitive cones are not missing in this case, but the peak of sensitivity is moved towards the red sensitive cones.
The retina of the human eye contains photoreceptors called rods and cones. Rods are sensitive to light, but cannot perceive color. Cones are responsible for color vision. Absence of, or defect in these cones results in color blindness.
Color blindness I can safely say, isn’t at all like what you imagine it to be unless you are color blind. When I see a photo, or even a real-life scene of something like the above I immediately have to question what I’m seeing. While I’d guess that there are probably red and green peppers in this photo, I see only different shades of green, and the photo on the right looks closest to what I’d call normal or “real.” If there are red peppers and you picked one up and isolated it from the green I’d be able to see the red, but red and green together just make different shades of green to me. I found this photo online and it came with no explanation other than the bold text so I’m left to guess, and that’s what life is for a color blind person. It’s all a guessing game due to what are called “confusion colors.” You can’t trust your own eyes, because you can never be certain that the color you see is the true color.
Confusion colors are pairs or groups of colors that will often be mistaken by the color blind. Confusion colors for red–green color blindness include:
Cyan and Grey
Rose-Pink and Grey
Blue and Purple
Yellow and Neon Green
Red, Green, Orange, Brown
I happen to have all the above, but especially red/ green and blue/purple.
When you try to explain color blindness people will sometimes think you’re faking it, so they’ll try to test you by asking you what color this or that is. This is when their ignorance of what color blindness is shines like a beacon. What they think someone could gain by pretending to be color blind I don’t know, but aha! they’ll say, you can see this color so you aren’t colorblind. They don’t understand that someone who is color blind can usually see the same colors they can, but certain colors overlap and can resemble other colors.
The question I hear more than any other is can I see the different colors in a traffic light? The answer is yes, I can tell whether they are red, yellow, or green. The reason I can see them is because they don’t light up at the same time. If they did I might have to stop driving because with my type of color blindness red can appear green, and that wouldn’t be good. What I do have to be careful with are the single blinking traffic lights, because often from a distance I can’t tell if it’s blinking yellow (caution) or red (stop and then proceed with caution). To solve that problem, I usually just stop at all of them and then proceed. And I hear some horn blowing.
While there are some unfortunate people who can see only black and white, their number is very small. Less than 1% of the population, I believe. Most color blind people (8-12% of men and 0.4-0.5% of women) have color confusion like mine. People who can see only black and white and shades of gray have Achromatopsia, which is also known as monochromacy. It is considered disabling.
Just one of many jaw dropping WOW moments with the glasses on.
In day-to-day life color blindness hasn’t really been much of a problem as long as I didn’t have to choose a paint color or buy flowers or decide to become an artist. If you want to see what color blindness can really do to a person just show them a handful of color chip cards from a paint store; the kind with twenty different shades of gray, for example. I’ve been slowly re-doing this house over the years and one of the rooms gets very hot from afternoon sunlight so I thought I’d paint it a cooler, light gray color. I also thought gray would be the easiest color of all to choose but when I started looking at colors I thought I’d lose my mind. Do we really need so many different shades of gray?
Another WOW moment.
For this blog I use photo editors that allow you to manipulate colors in photos but I rarely use that function. I usually stay with just simply sharpening or maybe lightening a shot. If I made every photo look like what I thought I saw, you might wish you could take my camera away. Before I post a photo here I check it with my color blind software (called What Color?) so I don’t say things like “look at this beautiful yellow flower I found” when the flower is orange. So, if you’ve wondered how I can see the colors in photos, that’s how I do it.
Sometimes color blindness can be a good thing. Mushroom hunters complain that purple trumpet or black chanterelle mushrooms are one of the hardest of all mushrooms to find, but I find them easily. I wondered why until I read that color blind people are highly sought after by the military because of their ability to “see through” camouflage. According to research done at the University of Edinburgh, people with red-green color blindness can more effectively use pattern and texture recognition. They can recognize differences in the landscape by watching for certain changes in patterns and textures rather than color changes. One theory says color blindness evolved because it would have been useful back when we all foraged for food. Part of our group or tribe would have been better able to see ripe fruit against green leaves and others in the tribe would have been better able to see animal movements in the undergrowth. In that way, everyone got their meat and vegetables. I hadn’t really thought much about it until I read about it but it is true that I’ve always been able to easily see differences in forest litter. For instance, I can often find mushrooms by seeing where a leaf has been lifted away from others by a mushroom coming up under it. Apparently purple trumpets are easier for me to find because what I see first is a disturbance in the appearance of the forest floor, and that leads me to the mushrooms. It makes perfect sense, but only if you’re color blind.
Emerson Moser, who was Crayola’s top crayon molder for almost 40 years, was color blind. It was a good thing he chose that career because you aren’t allowed to be an electrical engineer, a firefighter, a fighter pilot, or a paramedic if you’re color blind. And imagine being treated by a doctor who can’t see red. Testing sees that doesn’t happen.
I decided to do this post for two reasons. First is to let any color blind readers know that there is help out there. One of the worst things about being color blind is always having to rely on others to tell you what color things are, and I hope these glasses will let me and others get away from that. Maybe with them on I’ll be able to buy flowers without having to first find a clerk and ask them if they’re blue or purple. You can’t always go by the tag; some flowers can be more purple than blue, even when it says blue in the name. Such seemingly slight details mattered to the kind of people I used to garden for. One lady wouldn’t hear of having purple flowers in her garden because, she said “purple is for funerals.” Funny, I always thought it was for royalty.
The second reason I’ve done this post is to hopefully give those who aren’t color blind a better understanding of what color blindness is and how color blind people see and deal with life. If someone walks up to you in a grocery store and asks you if the tomatoes they’re holding look ripe, maybe now you’ll have a better sense of what’s going on. And yes, I have had to do this.
Finally, putting this post together has reminded me to always be grateful for being able to see. I’ve lived with the blind, so I know how fortunate I am. Sight, even if it takes the form of monochromacy, is a great gift.
An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind. ~Albert Schweitzer
Thanks for stopping in.
Note: The Crayola stamp shown is part of the U.S. Postal Service’s “Celebrate the Century” series issued in 1998.
American Foundation for the Blind
1108 Third Avenue, Suite 200
Huntington, WV 25701
https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision
New Hampshire Garden Solutions 