Tried It: EnChroma glasses for the colorblind
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| Available for modeling gigs. |
1) The company sent me two pair, for free, to try*.
2) They did so because I wrote about them for my day job, Chemical & Engineering News. This post is my responsibility alone and is not affiliated with C&EN or its publisher, the American Chemical Society. But I encourage you to check out that story, I talk to color vision scientists and with other colorblind scientists, and we really give the glasses a thorough look from a scientific standpoint. C&EN: Experimenting with EnChroma’s color-blind assistance glasses
With that out the way, they work! Kind of. It's subtle.
The biggest difference for me is that I can see the green of stoplights when I wear them. Normally stoplights look white, warm, and warmer to me. With the glasses on, the green light actually registers as green for me. For some people, that could be worth the $350 right there. If you're a person that buys nice sunglasses, you might be paying that anyway. The green of highway signs, which are normally grey to me, was also fun to be surprised by.
If you look for videos of people trying these glasses on, you'll see people weeping and carrying on as if putting on the glasses flipped a lightswitch and revealed all the glory of the electromagnetic spectrum to them. I think most of those people are faking it, at least to an extent. To Enchroma's credit, the videos they have in their media center tend to show people reacting more like, "Oh, hey, that's kind of neat, I think I see a difference here." Not, "THE COLORS! STRIKE ME DOWN, MOSES, I AM NOT WORTHY!" Maybe for a few people it is like that, who knows? But for me and the other colorblind people I tried the glasses with, it was more subtle.
The other main effect is that I can distinguish more colors in the red-orange-yellow region. A painting by my brother, Carl, hangs in my office at work. It's all in that color family. I liked it before, but with the glasses on, there is about 20% more detail I can see, which takes the piece from "I like it" to "Hey, that's a really nice painting!" I've gotten many compliments on it even before revealing the family connection, and now I can see what the fuss is about.
The biggest difference for me is that I can see the green of stoplights when I wear them. Normally stoplights look white, warm, and warmer to me. With the glasses on, the green light actually registers as green for me. For some people, that could be worth the $350 right there. If you're a person that buys nice sunglasses, you might be paying that anyway. The green of highway signs, which are normally grey to me, was also fun to be surprised by.
If you look for videos of people trying these glasses on, you'll see people weeping and carrying on as if putting on the glasses flipped a lightswitch and revealed all the glory of the electromagnetic spectrum to them. I think most of those people are faking it, at least to an extent. To Enchroma's credit, the videos they have in their media center tend to show people reacting more like, "Oh, hey, that's kind of neat, I think I see a difference here." Not, "THE COLORS! STRIKE ME DOWN, MOSES, I AM NOT WORTHY!" Maybe for a few people it is like that, who knows? But for me and the other colorblind people I tried the glasses with, it was more subtle.
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| Pictured: Not what it's like. |
The glasses have an interesting backstory. According to Kent Streeb, EnChroma's marketing director, the guy who invented the glasses used to make special goggles to protect the eyes of laser surgeons. These lasers fire light at a very narrow band of wavelengths (color), so the glasses are made to block just that band. But the doctors liked the way the world looked through the glasses, so they would filch them and wear them around town. One such doctor wore his purloined spectacles to an Ultimate Frisbee game, and was blown away by what he saw: grass is green. No, like, REALLY green you guys! For the first time, the grass really was greener on the other side (sorry, couldn't let that pass by unused), and he could spot the cones marking the field much better. And that's how the company thought to explore producing them as a consumer product.
EnChroma's tech carries some controversy. One critic claims that for every two colors the glasses allow you to distinguish, there's another two colors you no longer can. And I observed some discrepancy between the UV-Visible absorption spectrum of the lenses and the scientific explanation the company gives on their website (more info on that in the C&EN article). They work for only a subset of the colorblind population, though that subset includes the two most common types. But it is clear that there's a real observable effect here.
When I first learned that EnChroma was going to send me their glasses to try (and keep, thanks guys!), it was exciting. The first lead I wrote for my C&EN story was "Imagine seeing a brand new color that no one has ever seen before." I wanted them to work and be amazing, and I had to work myself back around to a place of journalistic impartiality.
In real life, it's neat. It's not huge, it didn't change my life forever. But EnChroma's glasses let me see green. I'm looking forward to trying them in the garden and in the fall colors.
*Are you a marketer, inventor, chef, etc with a funky thing I could try and write about? That'd be great! Send me note, let's do it.
When I first learned that EnChroma was going to send me their glasses to try (and keep, thanks guys!), it was exciting. The first lead I wrote for my C&EN story was "Imagine seeing a brand new color that no one has ever seen before." I wanted them to work and be amazing, and I had to work myself back around to a place of journalistic impartiality.
In real life, it's neat. It's not huge, it didn't change my life forever. But EnChroma's glasses let me see green. I'm looking forward to trying them in the garden and in the fall colors.
*Are you a marketer, inventor, chef, etc with a funky thing I could try and write about? That'd be great! Send me note, let's do it.