Trying Enchroma’s glasses

Many years ago, when I was around 14 years old, I visited the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia with my uncles. It’s a futuristic complex of buildings that includes a science museum.

One exhibit in this museum was about color blindness. Color blindness tests consist in a series of dotted patterns where each dot has a different color, forming the shape of a number or letter in the middle. Color blind people struggle to differentiate such colors, making it difficult or impossible to identify the shape. It soon became clear that I was mildly colorblind, specifically in the red-green spectrum. According to some stats I found online, 8% of men are colorblind.

This discovery didn’t really have a big impact in my life, but I kept some interest in learning more about it and curiosity about how the world is differently seen by other, non-colorblind people. I did some occasional research about it and found out about a bunch of videos that went viral: some company called Enchroma made a pair of glasses that allowed colorblind people to see color. In the video you could see people crying when they saw color for the first time.

Obviously I was instantly curious about it, but it was logistically complicated. Enchroma’s glasses are expensive and not guaranteed to work on everybody, their results vary and you need to try them for a few days before fully appreciating color. They were also sold uniquely in the US, so there’s a big risk of having to go through complex logistics in case I decided to return them.

There’s also some technical concerns: nothing can really make see color as non-colorblind people do. The only actual solution would be to alter my genetics in such a way that my eye cells react appropriately under green and red light. All things considered, I decided to wait a few years and see if the company expanded.

And so they did. At some point they started selling their glasses in a store near Barcelona, and my aunt found out about it. She gave me a pair as a present and it’s being one of the most interesting experiences in my life.

Enchroma work by filtering out certain wavelengths that overlap between red and green colors. The result, for anyone who wears these glasses, is a kind of saturated image but most importantly, for a color blind it “forces” red and green to look different, instead of merging in a mushy set of brown gradients.

In practical terms, this means I am now able to appreciate a huge difference in any color that contains any amount of red or green. The colors I was more impressed about were purple, pink and orange.

To be clear: I’ve always known how purple, pink and orange look like. I I can identify them when they’re isolated, say, on a screen, or when they dominate an environment. But I completely lose them whenever they compose small details in a more complex image, like some clothes in the street, a small graffiti, or a distant building.

Wearing these glasses, I realized these colors are far more common than I thought. As I walked around Gracia I was continuously shocked by small details: a flower in a window that I would have overlooked before, some guy’s brightly colored clothing, vehicles… It turns out that Barcelona is a far more colorful city than I realized.

Now I wear my glasses whenever I get the chance. Even though I know I don’t really see the world as it is, I get to enjoy the variety of shades that the world offers. If you’re colorblind like me, I’d say these glasses are 100% worth what they cost. Give them a shot and good luck!