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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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The belief that colour blind glasses work
See megalag's videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppobi8VhWwo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QQtOv2PlOE
The videos I've seen on YouTube saying they don't work have all been by people who have normal vision.
I have mild red-green colorblindness, and for someone like me the glasses absolutely do work.
I don't have enough cones for red and green to see certain shades properly. The glasses turn down the other colors in order to bring my perception of red and green back into balance. I then see the right shades but darker like wearing sun glasses.
The first time I wore them in the fall it blew my mind to see all the different colored trees that are just green or brown without the glasses.
There would have to be thousands of people lying their entire lives saying we see brown where other people see color in order for the colorblind glasses to be a hoax.
It's such a ridiculous assertion, yet YouTube is full of videos saying they don't work.
Disclaimer: Let me be clear, I'm definitely NOT defending the color blind glasses, and especially not the ridiculously expensive and over-priced, scam brand(s). Also, not going to watch videos on YouTube so my comment doesn't take any context from those links. All that being said ...
Sometimes people don't realize that color blindness is a spectrum and that there are different types. For example, a lot of people like me might more accurately be described as color vision deficient. To me, I can clearly and easily differentiate between red and green in most practical circumstances, particularly in close range. Things can get dicey from a distance, as well as with very subtle tints or with very dark colors.
A number of years ago, I purchased a cheap (like less than $20USD) pair of fishing sunglasses (mirrored, polarized sunglasses that typically use bright red, orange, or green tinting of the lenses) right before taking a trip in the fall. When I put those sunglasses on, it was really surprising. All of a sudden I could differentiate between the trees that were dead or which had already dropped their leaves, versus those that were actually bright red. Normally, unless I'm looking at a specific tree from a close distance, the browns, reds, and grays all sort of look the same and blend in. From a distance, like from the top of a mountain looking down into a valley, the fall color change of the leaves is a bit underwhelming normally. With the glasses on, I could actually see individual trees or clusters of trees that were red.
To be clear, the cheap sunglasses didn't restore my color vision. I assume it just shifts the spectrum a bit so that colors, which are normally very muted for me, actually stand out in the same way that bright yellows and blues do. And I know that the colors I'm seeing are tinted, so not 100% accurate to what a person with full color vision would see.
And when I've tested the fishing glasses with Ishihara tests (numbers in the colored dots), they do not improve my ability to make those out. So, that's further evidence that they aren't actually restoring my color vision. Granted, the fishing sunglasses never marketed themselves that way, where as the expensive scam color vision correcting glasses heavy imply that they are miraculous even if they don't outright state that they restore color vision.
Wow, I actually believed in this one. Is there a short text version of what the videos are explaining?
Main idea: They can't restore any color by filtering or let you perceive any new colors as their marketing likes to claim. At best they might be able to improve contrast of certain colors while reducing contrast for others - which is not at all what they say it does
The video goes much more into depth about their deceptive marketing and such
It always weirded me out that people believed what the marketing implied. Like, it's a problem with the eye, no change in the color your eye is exposed to will somehow fix a problem that is within the eye. If those glasses were able to make you see blue or whatever, you wouldn't be color-blind!
The simple version is that color blindness is caused by a physical problem with your eyes. If you don't have the parts required to detect certain colors then no glasses are going to fix that. They're just tinted glasses, the guy in the video tries three different pairs from different companies and all they do is tint the world a hideous shade of pink/magenta.
As someone else said above, what they can do is change your ability to differentiate between objects of slightly different colors. You might have a really hard time telling the difference between red and green, but find it easier to tell the difference between hideous vaguely reddish magenta and hideous vaguely greenish magenta. They don't grant you a greater range of color vision, but they do change what color is actually hitting your eyes. Mostly into hideous magenta.
FWIW the guy in the video points out that in his experience it generally made colors harder, not easier, to differentiate.
That never made any sense to me. If the problem is with the cones in your eyes, then filtering the light going into them isn't going to magically do anything. At best, you might be able to do stuff with contrast to make colors more distinct, but someone that's red-green color blind could only have that actually fixed with new eyes.
Turns out that some people have overlap in color perception that muddies things, and when you use these glasses to filter out the "in between" wavelengths, everything becomes easier to distinguish.
Whereas I believed it with the analogy of hearing aids. There are a lot of people with hearing issues who can benefit from a simple amplification, or a more complex amplification of specific frequency ranges or filtered sound. By analogy, it seems perfectly reasonable that color-blindness may not be a binary condition so many people could benefit from more clearly distinguishing or amplifying certain frequencies. If I have a hard time distinguishing red from green, why wouldn’t glasses that filter red and green differently potentially work?
Hearing aids aren't really comparable. You still hear fine, but volume needs to be at a higher intensit. Hearing aids solve the problem with simple amplification. Corrective lenses for myopia and hyperopia are similar, correcting errors in something that's essentially just calibrated wrong.
Color blindness is more like being deaf. Don't think of your eyes as being one input generating a single image, but each eye being four inputs generating four images that are then composited. With color blindness, at least one of those pre-composite images is just not being generated at all. Like how a genuinely deaf person can't benefit from hearing aids because they don't have funcional ears, a colir blind person can't get new colors from simple lenses because they don't have cones capable of detecting those colors.
You can play music really loud for someone who's hearing is degrading and they'll hear it fine if it's loud enough, but you can't get someone who is red-green color blind to see green by ramping up the intensity of the green; they can't see that color for much the same reason I can't see ultraviolet or infrared.
From the posts of people saying it helped, I assume that like deafness can be a spectrum from hard of hearing to no inner ear nerves, color blindness can vary from limited cones for a color to no cones at all.
As a colorblind person, I'm constantly baffled that I have to explain that an external device isn't going to modify how my eyes work. My eyes can't see the colors. Glasses aren't going to change that. The best I can hope for is that the glasses help me distinguish two colors I struggle with by forcing them to appear further away on the spectrum but never more than that.