Color blindness, better described as color vision deficiency, currently affects over 13 million Americans. From choosing what outfit to wear to enjoying a beautiful sunset, these everyday details are often taken for granted by people unaffected with colorblindness.
So what exactly is color blindness?
Put simply, color blindness is the inability to detect certain light colors using the cones of your eyes. People with normal vision use three cone types to perceive light colors. If even one of these cone types perceives light slightly skewed, then color blindness will occur.
1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women (.5%) are color blind. The most common type of color blindness is the inability to detect red-green colors. Red-green color blindness accounts for 98-99% of color blind people. On the more rare side, blue-yellow accounts for only 1-2% of color blind people. The most severe form of color blindness is called monochromatic vision, which limits people from detecting any color at all, resulting in black and white vision.
The Good News
Interestingly enough, a company called EnChroma first discovered that eye glasses had an amazing effect on the color blind, completely inadvertently! Co-founder Don McPherson Ph D., was blissfully unaware that a frisbee game would lead to the invention of corrective lenses color blindness. While playing frisbee with a friend, McPherson wore protective eyewear he developed to help doctors perform surgeries. It was then that he noticed how much the glasses enhanced the colors around him. His frisbee partner who happened to be color blind asked to try them on. What happened next was astounding. His friend was able to detect beautiful colors he could never see before, and the rest is history. Seven years later, with the support of National Institutes of Health, EnChroma glasses were born.
People around the globe are calling these specialized EnChroma glasses “magic.” They’ve been tried and tested by the color blind community and the results are astonishing.
So what makes these glasses so special? Although these lenses look like ordinary tinted glasses, when you try them on, something brilliant happens: color vision is restored and eyesight is virtually transformed. Whether it’s a sunset, fruit, or flowers, colors appear more vivid and robust while still maintaining the integrity of the scene and quality of color balance.
“It is extremely rewarding to see EnChroma glasses help thousands of red-green color blind people see colors more like those of us with normal color vision. It is amazing to be able to share in the emotional experience of a color blind person seeing things for the first time, like more of the colors in a sunset, or the color of a loved one’s eyes, to seemingly mundane things like being able to differentiate between shades of green in grass or picking out a plane flying overhead in cloudy conditions.” – Kent Streeb, Director of External Communications, EnChroma
Enchroma manufactures indoor-outdoor hybrid and outdoor only glasses for all ages. Their glasses work for 4 of 5 red-green color blind people.
At FixMyGlasses, we are so thrilled with this discovery. We support EnChroma’s mission to bring color to the color blind, one pair of glasses at a time.
