What Is Color Blindness
Color blindness is a general term that encompasses a number of deficiencies in a person’s ability to perceive color. There are three different types of color blindness, and varying degrees and types of each. The Greek prefixes prot-, deut-, and trit- (first, second, third) indicate red, green, or blue cones, respectively, based on their frequency (red is the most common, then green, then blue). The suffixes -anomaly (abnormality) and -anopia (absence of sight) represent either a cone that is not aligned correctly or one that does not function at all. Thus, someone with deuteranomaly would have an abnormality in the function of their green cones.
Trichromacy
Trichromacy is when all three of the color cones in the eye are working correctly. When one type of cone is slightly out of alignment, this is called anomalous trichromacy, and is the most common form of color blindness with approximately 75% of color blind people, including myself, falling into this category. Most anomalous trichromats have what is called deuteranomaly, which is a reduced sensitivity to green light. Protanomaly is the next most common, and is a reduced sensitivity to red light. The most rare form of anomalous trichromacy is called tritanomaly, the reduced sensitivity to blue light.
Dichromacy
When a person has one type of cone that is completely non-functional, they’re considered dichromatic. Dichromats are categorized as protanopes, deuteranopes, or tritanopes, depending on which cone is not functioning. Like with tritanomaly in trichromats, tritanopia is the most rare form of dichromacy. In fact, tritanopia and tritanomaly are about as rare as monochromacy, or true color-blindness.
Monochromacy (achromatopsia)
Monochromacy is the inability to see any color at all, and is extremely rare. Only 1 in every 30,000 or so people suffer from achromatopsia.
My Life with Mild Deuteranomaly
As a child, I didn’t know I was color blind. When a kid squints at the chalkboard or asks that things be repeated, it’s fairly obvious you should check out his vision or his hearing. With color blindness, the signs are not as apparent. In my experience, it mostly consisted of me using a lot of “ish”es and questioning tones when talking about colors, which I still do to this day.
“I think I’ll wear my, um, blueish? shirt today.”
The point is, I don’t feel like I really missed out on anything. I’d occasionally grab blue dress socks, thinking they were black, or a pair of brown pants only to be told later that they were green. As an amateur photographer, I have learned to trust Photoshop’s white balance eyedropper and I make sure to have my wife proof my images before they’re sent to the printer. Still, it’s not like I’m defusing bombs or something. There are worse things in the world than suffering from mild deuteranomaly. The only awkward part was having to correct all the wrong assumptions people made. Being color blind doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t see color, any more than being legally blind means you can’t see, well, anything.
Still, I have sometimes wondered if everyone else was living in an episode of a Saturday morning cartoon while I plodded along in a world directed by Zack Snyder.
So when Enchroma contacted GeekDad about reviewing their Cx lenses, I jumped at the opportunity. If nothing else, maybe I’d be able to grab the right socks or create a photo where the snow doesn’t end up being blue.
The Test Drive
To test the lenses, the people at Enchroma recommended a brightly lit, colorful location like a grocery store. This being a review for GeekDad, I wanted to try them out somewhere a little more appropriate to our audience. Plus, I wasn’t going to be some nut job videoing themselves in a grocery store – so, I decided I’d be some nut job videoing himself in a LEGO Store instead. I spoke with the manager and explained who I was and what I was doing, and she was happy to allow us to record the unboxing in their store.
Remember in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy stepped out of her house and into Munchkin Land for the first time? How she stared in awe at the chromatic cornucopia that lay before her?
The first time I put on my new Frameri glasses with Enchroma Cx lenses, that is exactly what I did not experience.
I had watched the emotional unboxing videos where people saw color for the first time, videos of the Indiana boys who all got a pair, the dad who cried looking into his kids’ eyes, the other dad whose family took him to the mountains for his birthday, and I so wanted my experience to be like theirs. I wanted to weep as I reveled in some fantastic new range of the color spectrum with which only people with normal color vision or a history of hallucinogenic drug use were familiar.
The truth is, I didn’t really expect any of that. You see, I had already talked to the people at Enchroma at length regarding the lenses. I understood how they worked and what they were, and were not, capable of doing. And in doing so, I came to the not-exactly-startling realization that there are people on the internet who are not completely honest. Here are a few things to consider when critically analyzing these videos.
- Immediate gratification
- According to the person at Enchroma, typical response to the glasses takes from 5-15 minutes up to a few hours or even a few days. Everyone responds differently, and while it’s possible that someone could be struck immediately by the difference, this was not my, nor the typical, reaction.
- “They cured my color blindness!”
- Enchroma Cx lenses are no more a cure for color blindness than regular prescription lenses are a cure for poor eyesight. They are a corrective lens, designed to help the wearer see colors better while they are being worn. While the rep did say they have had reports of people who claim persistence of color vision after removing the glasses, and they’re looking into the claims, there have not been any verifiable instances of uncorrected color vision improvement.
- “I’ve seen nothing but gray my whole life, and now I can see color!”
- No, just no. Remember the types of color blindness I described above? Wearing a pair of glasses will not miraculously “turn on” the cones in your eyes that aren’t working. Enchroma Cx glasses can not help you if you have Dichromacy or Monochromacy.
- Self selection
- Very few people are going out publishing videos on YouTube of a pair of glasses not doing anything. According to the Enchroma website, they see about an 80% success rate. To their credit, they do offer a full money-back guarantee if the glasses don’t work for you.
So, what in these videos is true? Here are a few select quotes (well, paraphrases) from some of the more popular videos that accurately describe what wearing the Enchroma Cx lenses is like.
- “I can see the difference between the cars (or melons, apples, flowers, and other like-colored items).”
- This is the biggest advantage of wearing the lenses, and is the reason why I still wear mine regularly when driving. Not so much so I can see the difference between Ford red and Chevy red, but so that the red stoplight and the red sunset are more clearly differentiated. Driving down the street, I am amazed at how obvious red lights are now. I will admit to having blown through a red light or a stop sign in the past, and when I did, it was usually because I didn’t even see it. Wearing the glasses it is now much more apparent to me the difference between the red of a stoplight and the red of a sunset. Similarly, green lights stand out much more from the blue sky background.
- “I can see the apples in the tree (or flowers in bush, M&Ms in the jar, and other different-colored items)”
- Not only can I see the different shades of a single color, I can more easily see an item that is differently colored when it is in front of another object. The apples in the tree is a good example. It’s probably not obvious to people with normal color vision, but you rely quite a bit on color to differentiate items that overlap or are intertwined. Brown pine cones are invisible in an evergreen tree, and spotting a deer in the forest is nearly impossible without some movement. With the Enchroma lenses, things are no longer “invisible.” I more quickly pick up patterns and have more than once uttered, “Huh, I never noticed that before.”
- “…purple…orange…I can’t even.”
- Back to my experience in the LEGO store. There’s a reason this article doesn’t include a video. After less than a minute of recording, I realized that it was the most boring Enchroma unboxing video ever created. There was no “a-ha” moment, no great discovery. It was basically me looking around saying, “Hmm. That looks a little different,” or, “I guess that is a bit brighter.”
What it doesn’t show is, just seconds after shutting off the recording, a guy walked into the store with a Denver Broncos orange shirt on, and I couldn’t stop staring at him. I honestly assumed it was some Chinese knock-off shirt where they don’t get the shade quite right because this was the orangest Broncos shirt I had ever seen in my life.
And as we continued walking around the mall (of course, forgetting to start recording again), I was awestruck by the purples and oranges everywhere. In my mind there was day-glo, traffic cone orange, and then there was every other orange. Same with the purple. I remember stopping in front of this cosmetics sign and just looking at it for 30 seconds. It must have had a dozen shades of purple in it. If you have seen the Enchroma video of the guy who now wears purple everywhere, and even colored his hair purple, you’ll have a general idea of how experiencing new colors can change your life.
Flowers with normal color vision (top) and deuteranomaly (bottom)
Summary
So, are the Enchroma Cx lenses the life-altering experience the videos would lead you to believe? Honestly, they kind of are. No, they don’t magically turn a gray world into a Pixar movie, but coming from someone who only noticed slight changes and was still pretty blown away, I can imagine how a drastic improvement could quite literally change your world view.
You can read more about how the lenses actually work by filtering out the overlap of the cones, as well as take a test to see if Enchroma Cx lenses might be beneficial to you, at the Enchroma website. For more information regarding color blindness in general, check out colourblindawareness.org.
I was provided a pair of Frameri glasses with Enchroma Cx prescription lenses for the purpose of this review. All opinions are my own.
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I enjoyed the review, just curious as to which lenses were in your frames: the CX-14 (Dark Sunglasses), the CX-25 (Medium Sunglasses), or the CX-65 (Indoor/Computer lenses)?
Thanks. I have the CX-25.
Did you work with photoshop while wearing glasses. CX-65 is recommended for computer etc. I work in photoshop but would rather have something I could wear outdoors, like the CS-25. Did you find you could work photoshop with the CX-25s?
Unfortunately, no. The CX-25s were billed as kind of an indoor/outdoor, in-between model, but they were still too dark for computer work for me.
Randy,
I hadn’t noticed the sliders. Thank you. Now I can show my wife what I’m seeing, something she’s always asking me.
Hi, thanks for the review! Did you notice any difference with the Ishirara test wearing the glasses?
Monochromacy is actually one color, achromatopsia is having no colors, one of which I happen to be. Thanks for the review, I now know this product sadly will not work for me.
I took the 38 plate test and the results indicate i have moderate protan. The first question that should be asked is what was the difference retaking the test after you got your glasses. Like 25% correct vs 40% rather than “I guessed 3 more correctly. There needs to be a “measurable” before any verifiable results can be claimed.
My son spends the majority of his time on the computer so we ordered the CX-65 with his prescription. They arrived today. The results- underwhelming. Of course what they DON’T say on the website is that the darker lenses are the ones people are having reaction videos to. I didn’t know that- in fact, I didn’t know we were deciding between the effectiveness when we chose the indoor/computer lenses. Had we known, we may have chosen differently. My son still noticed a difference in the purples, which is fine, but again, we were expecting more.
Out of curiosity, we went back into Enchroma’s site and he took the colorblindness test. Totally failed- in other words, his correction was negligible.
When I called customer service to find out why his glasses didn’t correct his deficiency, I’d expected to talk more with about the product, but she shut me right down. Apparently “I” was the dummy for expecting the CX-65’s to work. She even read me the phrasing on the website, that this is suggested as a “second pair of glasses” which means….something. I’m not sure what that means. But, it was important to her enough that she read it to me TWICE. Not understanding the point (which is that we were disappointed)rather than addressing any of that, she said we had 60 days to return them. Having 4 sons with RG colorblindness, I’d hoped to order 3 more pair instead of being dismissed as not having understood the limitations of the glasses.
Started with 6 out of 10, but after talking with customer service, it’s 2 out of 10 for us.
I was very disappointed too. I ordered the indoor one and it did not work at all. Please be alert that if you need to return, you will have to pay the shipping, which Enchroma does not say it on its website.
I have a severe color blindness with Red and Green. I was excited to try the Enchroma glasses to see if it fixes my color blindness. I made an appointment with an optometrist in Palo Alto, Ca to try the Enchroma glasses yesterday. I tried it for half an hour walking around the optometrist store. The effect was at best marginal. I also compared the Enchroma with my Maui Jim sunglasses and honesty I think the Maui Jim did a better job of making the colors more vivid. Neither one of them resolved my color blindness. When I went back to the store, I asked the optometrist to bring a color blindness test so I can take the test with or without the Enchroma. Again, no difference whatsoever. I mean zero. Even the optometrist told me that I won’t be able to tell the difference and that should not be my expectation.
So, I don’t understand, if this company claims that they can correct for color blindness, on what basis they make this claim. The Ishihara color blindness test (or test similar to Ishihara) is the objective and acceptable clinical test for color blindness. Even Enchorma uses the test on their website to test your degree of color blindness. So if you claim that you are solving the problem, you would assume that if you wear Enchroma, and retake the same test, you should see a noticeable improvement.
I guess I should have known better since the company has no FDA clearance, no clinical data or scientific publication to support their claims. Needless to say, I was very disappointed to waste my time and fall into a trap of another clever marketing scheme.
Amir.
The color blindness test you did at the store, using the Enchroma, and you have not seen any difference, was the Ishihara?
Thanks
“From right to left: normal color vision, mild deuteranomaly, Deuteranopia, Monochromacy (Achromatopsia)”
Should read “From LEFT to RIGHT…” in order to match the picture.
>> because this was the orangest Broncos shirt I had ever seen in my life
So, when you look at something that you would consider to be a strong orange without Enchroma, what would it become when you have the Enchroma on? Would it become the “Ultimate Orangest”? I am wondering because, being a mild deuteranomaly, when I see the “intense colors” that I still consider acceptable, my wife would often say that they are too “bright”, or too much.
Yes, “ultimate orangest” is a good term. If you’re familiar with hunter’s “blaze orange”, you’ll get an idea. With the glasses, many orange things looked like they were blaze orange.
I was so excited to surprise my boyfriend, who is color blind, with these (very expensive) glasses. I took a video to capture his reaction. It was a real bummer when the glasses didn’t work for him, AT ALL. And it was doubly disappointing that I had to PAY to ship them back to the company. When I asked Enchroma to pay for the return shipping because the glasses didn’t work, they said I should have had my boyfriend take the online test before buying. They have a multitude of videos on their website with people who were surprised by a family member with the glasses. Makes it that much more special. So they wanted me to ruin the surprise? Not fun. They didn’t care.
That was a good review! Even I saw the EnChroma videos and then I was like,”They have to be exaggerating. It sure works, but the videos are showing reactions of the overtly expressive bunch”.
I myself had worked on setting up screen RGB filters to help myself with ishihara test plates, and I started browsing my photos in that mode. And I believe what I saw is what they see with the glasses (albeit a pigment filter). I had reduced green values and left red and blue values unchanged.
However, I do believe my driving suffers just like yours, so I plan on getting… umm… developing a pair of these glasses, DIY 😉
Nobody seems to be saying if the glasses help with the color blindness tests? For me would be the main reason to wear the things.
Short answer…no. If you wanted to do something that required perfect color vision such as defusing a bomb or the like, wearing these would not allow you to do that job. They help discriminate colors in a certain range. These are reductive, not additive.
It’s a bad analogy, but imagine you had a repeating pattern of green lines and red lines separated by a line of another color that your brain had trouble determining if it was red or green. You might have trouble noticing the green lines because the red and the “other” color merge everything together. Now, imagine that I removed that “other” color (or made it more red or green). You are more likely to see that green color now. This is why I mention my biggest improvement was with stop lights. It’s not like before I thought the red light was a yellow light or something silly like that. It was that the lights tended to get lost in the sky (red lights in the evening sky, green lights when it was overcast).
Also, be aware that if you are missing a specific cone, there is nothing you can do about it.
Please, can anybody simply answer the question:
Someone who had not passed on Ishihara, has passed after, wearing these glasses?
Thanks
Marcos,
See my comment above to Joel. I don’t know what “passing” a Ishihara test means. If you are missing cones, no glasses are going to help. If you aren’t missing cones, but there is just some weird overlap and you are having trouble differentiating, I suppose it’s possible that if you got 9 out of 14, you may get 10 the next time because there was that one plate you thought just might be a “4”, but turned out it was a “7”.
I actually like this test more than the Ishihara:
http://www.color-blindness.com/color-arrangement-test/
There’s not that idea of, “I *think* I see a number…maybe?” You just grab the color that looks right to you and when you’re done, it tells you where you lie. I’ll try to remember tonight to do this test with and without my glasses and let you know the results.
Thanks very much Randy.
Regards
Any updates?
$430 glasses, did improve my color vision, but I cannot pass Ishihara test with this glasses. A simple red candy wrap paper help me passing the test 100% correct.
Should I buy the candy or glasses?
Great article sir, thanks for sharing. Also, found a cool video of a doctor trying the enchroma eyeglasses after over 5 decades of color blindness…
I can’t believe you would assume the people who have a good experience with these glasses were lying or exaggerating. My 16 yr old son is severely color deficient. His optometrist suggested only 1% of color deficiency is this severe, and his Enchroma plate test said “severe protan, 30% chance the glasses will help.” He’s never seen the real hue of red and purple, and some hues of every color in the spectrum are affected. Traffic light color, and brake lights & turn signals are completely unnoticeable to him.
Since Enchroma has a guarantee, we saved up and decided to try them. The result was amazing. My son didn’t have the extreme reaction of some of the videos you’ve seen, but his reaction to opening his first set of car keys at Christmas was similarly muted. He’s a very calm person. He noticed a huge difference immediately, and our evening was punctuated with “Whoa!” when he saw a new color, or one he thought was very different. He hasn’t had the chance to drive yet, but I was delighted when he could distinguish the traffic light color on a computer screen.
To the mom who has 4 color deficient sons- I’m sorry the customer service rep couldn’t have offered you more help, but I would try the outdoor glasses to see if you get a better result. My son loved them for watching TV, and looking at his tablet. He wore them indoors until after dark. I don’t know if any of your sons are old enough to drive, but it’s terrifying to be driving towards a traffic light at 55 mph and hear them say “That’s green, right?” when it’s not.
Unfortunately the outdoor glasses aren’t for use at night. I’m wondering if anyone has used the indoor glasses for driving at night. Do they work for traffic lights at dusk and after dark?
hey, i just got offered the indoor glasses, and i find them quite dark-tinted and really wouldn’t recommend them for night driving (maybe he’ll recognize the red on the sign, but he’ll be at risk of hitting that poorly-lit bump.) will try driving with them (i took them off to drive yesterday, i’m mildly affected, so i don’t really need them.) but i guess it’s manageable.
There are much less expensive brands of glasses for color blind people now available on Amazon but I have not been able to find any information about how these compare to the Enchroma glasses. It would be very helpful to have some comparison testing.
I tried to post a comment and got a message that I had posted it before which was not the case.
My question is whether there are any comparison tests between brands of color blind correction glasses?
Hey buddy, I’m a photographer/film maker myself, I was hoping you would mention something about photo editing/colour grading in your review.
Could you tell us if you don’t need wife anymore for edits?
I bought a pair. They had no effect whatsoever. Maybe they work for some, but alas not me.
hey guys just thought i would throw this out, iv been thinking about getting these glasses for quite some time but i cant justify the $500.00 + dollars (canadian) that they would cost. so i did some experimentation of my own. i did the test on enchromas website about 5 times and came up with mild to moderate deutan. and then started to do the test with various sunglasses with different lenses, yellow, brown, blue, rose ect.. and what i found (that worked amazing for me) was that the rose color glasses worked so amazingly that when i re-did the same test on enchromas site it told me i had normal color vision!! i could see all the hidden numbers. also purple flowers always looked blue to me and now they are so vibrantly pink or purple. im not saying it will work the same for everyone but if you have issues with red-green…give it a try. go to any sunglasses store try some on and pull up a color blind test on your phone. best of all its free and not $350-$420
Well, always important is our sights it is hard to live without seeing things around us that makes our daily lives moves forward. As like me that my world is turning only in product photography it is hard when I am a color blind to the things that I am going to get a capture. Thank you for this glasses that truely helps me through out the day.
Fascinating stuff! Seems like it’s a no-brainer if you can afford it.
Thanks for sharing.
Sam
Sorry your experience wasn’t the same as mine. I am color blind. It’s most obvious with pastels- I simply can’t see them. I also struggle with shades. Who knew the Bears wore navy blue and not black. But the world isn’t black and white. I do see color. My family bought the outdoor glasses for me at Christmas time, and they came in about a week ago. Sorry, but I disagree. It was EXACTLY like Dorothy entering Oz for the first time. I was overwhelmed. I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know. But, EVERY color blew up for me. The blue in the sky has always been my favorite color. With these glasses, it was a blue I had never experienced before- richer and fuller. Grey days are now full of color. Sunsets are amazing. I can’t wait to see a rainbow (they are currently just yellow archs in the sky for me). I supposed it depends on just how color blind you are as to what your experience will be. Mine was overwhelming. Yes, I did shed a tear, and I didn’t even realize it. You have to make certain you are red-green color blind- duetan. I tested at strong duetan, so I suppose that’s why I had such a strong result. I’m in the process of finding out how shaded the indoor lenses are. If they aren’t too dark, I’m getting a pair to go with my outdoor glasses.
Wish I read this before paying $500. Wore my Enchroma sunglasses for s few days. Zip. The only thing they did was saturate the colors I already saw.
My color-seeing wife also noted the saturation.
I am deeply disappointed after all the positive reviews. Thanks for telling it like it is. I scored “colorblind” on color tests with and w/out the Enchroma sunglasses.
Enchroma responded to there’s who did the test by explaining that the glasses wouldn’t help with that due to some scientific principle.
Really? So what’s the purpose of these glasses if I can’t see colors on a colorblind test?
I returned mine, but will be penalized for the corrective lenses + Return shipping.