Hello Nars Glinley and others. Nars knows most of the following because we have been in email contact, but for anyone else interested, here is what happened.
First of all thank you so much Nars, it has been amazing and you have been so generous. If anyone else out there is red/green color deficient please post in this thread and I will get these glasses to you and hopefully we can send them around to people world-wide just to give them a try, thanks to Nars.
A bit about my situation. I first found out I was color deficient when I was 21 in a biology practical class at university. We did the Ishihara test which consists of placards with circles of different colored dots. In some of the circles of dots a number will be apparent in the dots, formed by colored dots that are different from those around them. Color normal people will see the numbers where color deficient people wont. You just write down what number you see for each card and when I did it it turned out I was textbook red green deficient. (Incidentally I have also done the Ishihara test in Japan when trying to get my boating license and it is different in that it uses hiragana/katakana instead of numbers, and is actually trickier because color deficient people won’t see nothing, instead they will see one character, but color normal people will see a different character, like the difference between fu and ra in katakana is just an extra stroke).
Fast forward to now, 49 years old and these Enchroma glasses are available (Thanks Nars!). I’ve read the science behind the glasses but I’m still not convinced that these things will work. I am very much on the fence. In any case, even if I do see something different when I wear them, how do I know that this is what color normal people see? Right? There is no way of knowing. But then I thought that if I can pass the Ishihara test with the glasses then that makes it pretty likely that what I am seeing while wearing the glasses is what normal color vision looks like.
The glasses arrived from Nars two weeks ago and a spent a day or two preparing to make a first time wearing video for Nars. I put a copy of the Ishihara test up on my computer screen and I also had some artworks on my desk that heavily featured red and green in them. My wife filmed it.
At first I looked at the Ishihara test on my computer screen and didn’t see any difference (because I’m a dumbass – that test should be done on printed paper and in daylight or strong white light not under my orange study light, as I later found. Under daylight I could pass the test just fine while wearing the glasses, so I think they actually do work). Then I looked at the artworks and was … shocked. The two adjectives of the day were intense and varied. Red is about twice as bright as what I normally see and greens have so much more variation in them. Pink and Purple jump out like never before, too. I found them in objects where I had never even noticed them before. All other colors like blue yellow and black white and brown etc. were the same. By the way, I shared the glasses with a work friend who is also red green color deficient during lunchtime and we had exactly the same experience - the flowers (pink/red/purple) are trippy. And greens are just a much bigger spectrum.
End result: If you guys and girls see the world like that then I totally get why people rave about seasonal foliage. I haven’t decided whether I will buy my own pair of glasses. I have some idea of what you all see now, so as long as I can remember that, I think I am fine. And also, I would have to re-learn shopping for groceries if I wore the glasses all the time. I wouldn’t know which reds and greens were good for fruit and veges and meat.
I made a video of my first time using the glasses but that is just for Nars.
Cheers all and let me or Nars know if you want to try the glasses!
