Scientific Method —

Life in Technicolor—One month wearing EnChroma’s color blindness-fixing glasses

By blocking wavelengths, glasses create a new world complete with grass, traffic lights.

"Roses are red, the water is... purplish?"
Nathan Mattise

Like all of the scattered recollections I can access from the earliest years of my life, the memory is fuzzy. It’s more a cluster of blurry snapshots unified by a jumble of vague feelings. There is box of crayons, a wooden sailboat floating across the page, and a teacher’s loaded question.

“Why is the ocean purple?”

In this moment, there’s confusion, embarrassment, and about as much self-doubt as this barely self-aware first grader is capable of.

It is the first of several clues that I, like 13 million people in the US and an estimated 300 million worldwide according to The Atlantic, am colorblind. My condition gets confirmed not long after with the help of a school nurse and an Ishihara color vision test—basically a circle made up of many more tiny circles, all of which are very similar in color. They all have a number hidden among the dots, and folks like me have difficulty seeing some, or all, of those hidden numbers.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Aside from the aforementioned purple-sea debacle—and apart from once buying a pair of pink sunglasses that I truly believed to be gray and a purple shirt I was certain was blue—my condition hasn't impacted my life in any serious way.

I know that the bottom light in a traffic signal is the one that means go. And now, whenever I'm unsure about the color of a garment or accessory, I make sure to quiz the clerk at the checkout counter to make sure whatever I'm buying is the color I think it is.

For others, however, even a mild form of color vision deficiency can be life altering. In the most serious forms of this condition, it can be downright dangerous to perform certain tasks like work as an electrician or drive a car.

That's why Don McPherson, co-founder of the Berkeley-based EnChroma, has spent the past five years of his life developing a technology to help colorblind individuals see the world the way he does—that is, in full color. Along with his business partner, Andrew Schmeder, McPherson claims to have created a lens that can correct for a number of types of color vision deficiencies—including the specific form I have. By blocking a discrete number of wavelengths, he says, the EnChroma lenses can help my eyes send a clearer, more precise signal to the color-processing centers of my brain.

It's a bold claim; scientists have known about the condition of colorblindness for the better part of two centuries. However, while some have worked to develop tools to aid the color vision deficient, no one has produced a product that can offer people like me much more than a crude workaround. Clearly, there was only one thing to do—I had to give the EnChroma shades a whirl. Would I come to see my surroundings in a brand new light—or color, as it were? Can a product like this really make the world a better place for those like me?

The test

EnChroma is not a new product, nor is it the only set of glasses aiming at colorblindness (see 2AI Labs, for instance). Founded in 2012, the company has been enjoying an increase in profile over the last year or so due to things like some viral marketing success and lower consumer pricing according to the New York Times. Today buying a pair of EnChroma glasses will be familiar to anyone who's jumped into the online frames world pioneered by companies like Warby Parker. While you can find them at some optometrist offices and retailers, EnChroma provides both an online storefront and an online evaluation for would-be customers to shop from home. The frames run the gamut from roughly $250 to $450, and they come in various styles that may most closely resemble sunglasses. While the company is still growing, EnChroma even offers a "Product Testing Program," where would-be wearers can apply to earn a free pair through participating in certain company initiatives (like talking to the media).

My journey begins after work one evening, sitting alone in my office and staring at my computer screen. I read the instructions on the EnChroma website before embarking on Ishihara's “hidden number” colorblindness test. I can still vaguely remember the school nurse holding up a series of cards just like these. The circles within circles resemble a collection of perfectly round Nerds candies.

It’s worth noting that the term “color blind” is colloquial and imprecise. To the uninitiated it can suggest a complete lack of color vision, but I don’t see in black and white. Some people do (though that iteration of the condition is extremely rare), while others also labeled with color blindness see mostly in shades of blue and yellow.

Simply put, there are many types that range in severity from mild to extreme. As such, scientists use the more precise term “color vision deficient” when speaking broadly about folks like me—folks born with dysfunctional color-sensing hardware.

In my case, a genetic glitch has caused the red and green sensing cones inside my eyes to overlap more than they do in the eyes of individuals with normal color vision. My condition is often referred to as a “red-green” color vision deficiency. It is the most common form of the color blindness and accounts for 99 percent of all cases.

A sampling of the frame styles at EnChroma. See the <a href="">technical specs here</a>.
A sampling of the frame styles at EnChroma. See the technical specs here.

People like me may have trouble distinguishing between certain shades between green and brown, red and brown, and yellow and orange. Pinks can appear gray, purple and blue get mixed up a lot, and the green light in a traffic signal may appear to be nothing more than bright white—the same color as the little man in the crosswalk sign.

So though I know that I will not pass this EnChroma test with flying colors, and though no one is around to witness any small victory I might claim, I am oddly competitive. In many cases, I’m ultimately unable to detect any semblance or gesture of a numeral hidden among the dots.

After clicking through about 30 slides, I learn that I am a "moderate deutan" (pronounced "doo-tan"). I like the name. It sounds as if I am the middle-of-the-road member of some intergalactic political party.

“Moderate deutans (‘doo-tans’) have a moderate form of red-green color blindness caused by an anomaly in the M-cone photopigment gene sequence,” the website says. I am informed that as a moderate deutan, I will likely respond very positively to the technology at work in the EnChroma lens.

I find myself smiling and nodding in agreement as I read the symptoms of my condition. Color-name confusion? Check. Green lights appearing white? You bet. Peanut butter looks green? Um… not so much. I must be a moderate deutan, indeed.

The science

I meet McPherson on a sunny day at a former mattress factory in an industrial area of South Berkeley. The building now serves as his laboratory. Inside, workbenches are covered in panels of glass of various colors, a faded chart of the visible spectrum and a large poster of the periodic table of elements hang on one wall. Sunlight streams into the space through opaque windows.

This modern space is where EnChroma’s work pushes forward. When I visited, for instance, McPherson was excited about finally getting his hands on an anomaloscope, the most accurate tool available for determining the type and degree of an individual's color vision deficiency. But the road to advancing color correction took place well outside of a lab setting. In fact, McPherson says he stumbled upon the solution to providing the correct signal to color vision deficient eyes by accident.

Before founding EnChroma, McPherson worked for a company called Bay Glass Research—putting his Ph.D. in glass science to use by engineering better ways to protect the eyes of surgeons using high-powered lasers for precision medical procedures.

The first generation of protective eyewear these surgeons wore achieved its goal with thick, colored glass, which absorbed the powerful, eye-frying energy of the laser. However, those glasses gave the surgeons headaches and made it difficult for them to distinguish between the tan, pink, and red tones of human flesh. The physicians had little choice, they needed to rely on other visual cues during operation.

McPherson solved this problem by infusing glass panels with rare earth metals, which worked a bit like the surgeons he was aiding—by precisely targeting specific bands of the spectrum. These glasses effectively deflected the dangerous wavelengths of the laser, while letting all other light pass through.

The surgeons liked these glasses but not just in the operating room. McPherson soon got word that many of his clients were taking the shades home with them and using them as sunglasses. They liked the ultra-saturated world of color they produced. "They thought it was trippy and cool," he says.

The good scientist that he is, McPherson wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. And so, he made a pair for himself, inserting the customized glass panels into wrap-around Bollé frames, and unwittingly setting the stage for his a-ha moment.

In 2005, the self-described "avid ultimate Frisbee player" was wearing his high-tech shades at an ultimate tournament in Santa Cruz. While he was on the sidelines, resting, he lent the glasses to his friend and teammate.

"And he goes: 'Dude! These are so cool! I can see the cones!'"

McPherson's friend was referring to the orange, sideline-deliniating cones, which, as color blind man, he had previously been unable to see. McPherson knew this about his friend, and the news that his specialty glasses enabled him to see a color he had never seen before hit the EnChroma founder like a ton of bricks.

"I didn't play well after that," McPherson recalls. He was lost in thought—considering the nature of color vision deficiency and what exactly these particular glasses might be doing that to corrected for his friend's condition. After the match he began feverishly researching color blindness.

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