What do you mean “What number can you see?”

On living with colour-blindness and mowing the lawn in purple slacks

I remember the test during primary school. The A5 cards with a cloud of of dots on. The confusion and anguish felt when they ask what number you see and you reply there aren’t any numbers there. I remember the simplicity of the result. You’re colour-blind. And that was that. For the rest of my life. No information, no more tests, no remedies, no cure.

Then came the school years, littered with embarrassing moments. The self-portrait I did with green skin. The lion I painted (green again!) The art teacher who called me a colour-blind idiot in front of all my class. The relentless and tedious testing from friends, “what colour is this?” “what colour is that?”. Like I was some curiosity of nature.

Mercifully as you reach adulthood you find people are less inclined to test your colour perception. But it still has an impact. I can’t see much of a rainbow (just the blue and yellow). I am unable to discern a field of poppies from a distance. I, like my brother am prone to running the lawnmower over the orange flex. Autumnal leaves are just like any other type of leaf. The carefully chosen hair dye of women goes completely unnoticed to their displeasure.

Despite colour-blindness affecting 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, the World offers no favours for the colour-blind. At work when formatting a spreadsheet or designing marketing literature, I have no hope of picking a colour from the tiny hexagons Microsoft offer up. Opting instead for the standard ugly palette where a hover of the cursor may or may not provide a clue. I have to ask everyone else to change their pie charts and calendars for my sake and in return I produce things that are abhorrent to their eyes.

When playing video games, the minuscule triangles above the player’s heads are too small for me to distinguish. I can only be the yellow controller in Fifa or else I will relentlessly pass to my opponents. Sometimes, it becomes apparent after 2 minutes that I have conceded a goal and that the player I had been controlling had in fact been humping the advertising hoardings behind the goal. When I visit my good friend to play Halo and other first person combat games, I am forever committing friendly fire and murdering my own comrades.

Colour-blindness has safety implications too. I can’t see blood in a stool or redness on moles or on rashes. The green traffic light is dangerously similar to a white street light to my eyes (please do not notify the DVLA about this). Electrical wiring is not a strength of mine. Determining if chicken or pork have moved beyond poison stage requires a colour vision adjudicator.

Being colour-blind is particularly irritating to a creative like me. Among many other things, I am a freelance photographer. And a good one too, if I may say. People often express shock when I disclose this. “How can you be a photographer if you’re colour-blind” they say. “Because the camera takes the image I have composed”, I say.

For me, photography is a matter of light composition and timing, not colour. What I do have to do is be very conservative in post-production. To not fiddle about with saturation and the like so I’m not introducing a hue which I cannot detect and which makes others nauseous. A good friend of mine is a very successful graphic designer and he too is hopelessly colour blind and after 15 years in the field has never let on. We are still able to excel.

I’m also convinced that women have infinitely better colour vision than men in general. Or else they’re making things up. I often have confusing conversations with my wife over colours. Turquoise being a classic case. She often says a particular shade is blue when it is clearly green. Or something is green when it is clearly blue. Eventually she might concede that it is kind of turquoise and to help me understand she adds that turquoise is sometimes referred to as a bluey green or a greeny blue. It all seems rather silly to me. In any case, she picks the wall colours at home.

You may think that life for me is significantly duller. It isn’t. Yes, I wish I could see the full colour of nature. The rainbows, the sunsets, the rosy tints. But I still see beauty. So much beauty. I love a sunset, I love a rainbow, I love shards of light casting across a vibrant landscape. I just don’t see what you see.

When I was 30 I decided, since nobody else was going follow up on the test I did when I was 5, that I would find out for myself. I booked in to an optician and asked to take the test again. Before I went in I did some internet research. I found out that you could be Protanomalous (red deficient) deuteranomalous (green deficient) or in rare cases tritanomalous (blue deficient).

I asked the ophthalmologist to talk me through the test and the results. I wanted to know exactly how colour-blind I was. The answer was disappointingly vague but established that I was both green deficient and red deficient but mostly red. I again felt annoyed I couldn’t see the numbers in the dots.

For those still confused by colour-blindness, we colour-blind people don’t see black and white as some still assume (cats apparently do). All colours are a specific blend of the spectrum of light; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet (ROYGBIV).

For someone like me, red deficiency means I see the red pigment in all colours less than you do. This makes purples sometimes seem blue, it sometimes makes browns seem green (since brown is green with more red in it) and it makes colours like lilac and indigo pointless. The colour violet is completely irrelevant to me. The same applies to green deficiency in that it reduces the prominence of green in all colours which enter my eyes.

To be clear, I have no problem with the majority of colours. Primary colours are great, easy even. I can see and identify a wide range of other hues but it’s the subtleties at the top and bottom of the ranges I miss. When a luminous green verges on yellow, when a pale green could easily be beige or when a colour is a blend of two. My eyes are Hazel (a bit green, a bit brown). Natures sick joke.

Now before you say “oh you poor thing, you’ve never seen purple”. I have seen purple, I’ve seen every colour before my eyes. There is a point at which it becomes hard to explain, since I’ll never be able to see what you see and vice versa.

What intrigues me most is that I still see the colours, even the one’s I get wrong. You would think that over time, even though I may not see the colour indigo the way you do, that I could conceivably learn what it looks like when pointed out and be able to remember for the future. As a child I used to watch snooker on a black and white television and be able to distinguish brown balls from red. But it doesn’t seem to work like that. It is almost a memory recall problem. It’s like I’m seeing them for the first time, every time. Some colours just don’t get retained.

I listened to a fascinating podcast by the incredible people at Radiolab on Colors. In it they beautifully illustrate (via audio and a choir) the range of colours as experienced by different species of the animal kingdom.

The praying mantis shrimp of all things being the most able observer of colour. It all comes down to the colour receptors (or cone cells) in the retina. Humans are trichromats in that they have three varieties of cone cells which enable the perception of all the beautiful colours we know. The Mantis shrimp are endowed with 12 colour receptors enabling sight of infra-red and ultra violet hues which are imperceptible to the human eye* (this may have recently been debunked in a Nature Article). Either way, they see things we don’t. And you see things I don’t.

My personal colour deficiency means i have significantly less red cones as well as a reduced number of green ones, therefore reducing the amount of colour mixes my eye can describe to my brain. According to the Radiolab show my colour vision is akin to a dog.

This doesn’t make me feel any better as you can imagine, but it is interesting.

I may now be more informed about my colour-blindness, but it isn’t going to get any better. I see a company has designed a pair of sunglasses recently which allegedly fix colour-blindness, but it’s hard to believe they could genuinely compensate for those precious cone cells. Besides, who wants to be the helmet who wears sunglasses indoors?

You just have to accept it. I still have to avoid first person shoot’emups. I still create spreadsheets which make people want to hurl. I still have to invest in circuit breakers for the lawnmower and I still have to ask my 5 year old daughter to come shopping with me since the last time I bought trousers for work I picked purple ones.

So the next time you see a rainbow. Spare a thought would you. But don’t pity us. Life is beautiful for us, just as it is for you. Only slightly less red and green.