Colorblind people see colors for the first time and it’s magical

Imagine not being able to see color for your entire life  . . . and then being suddenly granted the ability. Imagine a black-and-white world transforming into a world of color.

This totally happened to a group of colorblind people, thanks to Valspar, a paint company, and EnChroma, creators of “color blindness correcting glasses.” And they’ve made a short four-minute documentary about it show the world how it feels to see colors for the first time.

MyModernMet tipped us off the video and also compared some amazing portraits from the video to reveal how the world looks before and after colorblind people wear the glasses.

Colors can enrich our lives more than you’d think. “There’s some drawings where I wish I could see how my kids put the colors together and what they were visualizing,” said one color-blindness sufferer, Andrew, in the video. “It’s not that I can’t name them, there’s nothing there.”

“I thought maybe I wasn’t intelligent enough to tell, because I didn’t know,” said Keith, who also suffers from color blindness. “And I didn’t tell my parents. So I stopped painting and drawing.”

It’s estimated that almost 300 million people suffer from color blindness, according to the documentary. The cause is not in the mind—it’s in the eye. “The problem exists in the eye, with photopigments,” said Donald McPherson, PhD, founder of Enchroma, in the video. “So Valspar is working with us at Enchroma to bring color to everyone. We developed these glasses to enable colorblind people to see color for the first time in their lives.”

In the documentary, Enchroma and Vaslpar gave the Keith, Andrew, and Atlee the glasses to try on. . . and TBH, it totally made us misty-eyed.

At one point, Atlee is shown a wall of colored swatches. With the glasses, she’s able to see pink, a color she had never witnessed before.

“I’ve never realized how much I was affected by the fact that I can’t see the world the way that other people see the world,” she says, tearing up.

Andrew is shown some of his child’s drawings, and he marvels over them. “When [my son is] drawing, I see him going in and out of his crayon box 150 times sometimes…and now I kinda know why,” he says quietly.

And when they’re shown a sunset, they are completely floored. “So is that what you guys see every day?!” Andrew says with wonder.

We are totally wiping tears away right now. Thanks to Valspar and Enchroma for their #ColorForAll initiative, and for opening up a whole new world to so many people.

Get the tissues ready and check out the full documentary below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea_xOqNvntA

(Images via MyModernMet via Valspar video)