#ColorForAll: EnChroma Eyewear Lets Colorblind People See The World With Brand New Eyes
The infamous black-and-blue or gold-and-white dress that broke the Internet made us all think for a second we had a slight case of colorblindness. Typically, it’s common to have trouble distinguishing between colors like navy and black and dark orange and dark red, but what about those who are colorblind? Valspar, a global leader in the paint and coatings industry has partnered with EnChroma, a manufacturer of colorblindness correcting glasses, to bring color to red-green colorblind people so they can experience the world in living color for the first time.
In the U.S, eight percent of men and 0.5 percent of women suffer from red-green colorblindness, the most common form of the condition, says the National Institutes of Health. Patients with this form perceive red and green as identical. But EnChroma’s glasses actually work as a filter that shifts light to better differentiate between colors. This would help improve colorblind people's perception of detail and depth in colored objects like traffic signals and signs.
Andrew, who is colorblind and appears in Valspar Paint’s video, "Valspar Color For The Colorblind," shares how he never has been able to truly appreciate his son’s sketches. "There are some drawings where I wish I could see how my kids put the colors together and what they were visualizing. It’s not that I can't name them — there's — there's nothing there," he says in the video.
However, once Andrew saw the world with "brand new eyes," with the EnChroma glasses, he was able to understand the beauty in art. "When he's drawing, I see him going in and out of his crayon box like 150 times sometimes," says Andrew about his son. "And now I kind of know why. There's a lot more colors here. All these things that are intentional in life, I never caught on to it."
EnChroma’s special eyewear is not meant to cure colorblindness but to be a product that can assist with it. Andrew is just one of the many colorblind people who share their personal stories and their reactions to experiencing color for the first time with the #ColorForAll initiative. Colorblind individuals are encouraged to share their own stories with #ColorForAll or at ValsparColorForAll.com, where responses will be featured along with additional footage from the short documentary "Color for the Colorblind."
One for color, #ColorForAll.