My colour perception

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No, I’m not colour blind, I’m ‘’colour deficient’’, which now is what people call me to be nice.

by Hendrik Rebane

I was first told that I was colourblind in kindergarten. I’m sure my teachers knew right away because when it was time to colour in my drawings I would usually colour my grass brown and my skies purple. I learned quickly to look at the names of the colours on crayons before putting them to paper - this got difficult when crayons became worn down and I could no longer read the names of the colours.

For a long time after I was told that I was colourblind I didn’t believe it. I can see every colour in the rainbow but what I’ve come to realise is that colours that are very bright for other people are not as bright to me. It doesn’t make a big difference in my everyday life. I don’t plan on being a fashion designer or an aeroplane pilot so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. Though there are some times when it gets really annoying, such as trying to read colour coded grapes or looking at a map to see how heavy traffic is on the way home from work (which is freaking impossible for me).

Original

© Hendrik Rebane

Simulated (I see no difference in colour itself)

© Hendrik Rebane

What’s it like to be colour-blind? I’ll summarise it in points:

• As you’d expect, when I tell people I’m colourblind, people always ask me “Oh, what colour is that?” This is highly irritating and I’ve got this question at least a 1000 times. And no, we don’t see the world in black and white either.

• I usually identify colours through prior-knowledge, not perception. If you asked me what colour the bark of a tree was, I would say “brown” not because I could see that it was brown, but because I know that tree barks are supposed to be brown.

• I don’t know the colours of most of the objects around me. When I see an object like that, no colour just pops up in my head - I just see a coloured object. So, when people ask me to guess what colour it is, I have no choice but to say “I don’t know” This answer is rarely satisfactory for people. It’s not easy to just guess when you know you’re most likely going to be wrong. Very rarely is my hunch correct.

• Colours are not ‘switched’ and ‘substituted’ for me. I don’t always see dark-brown instead of green and green instead of dark-brown. Everything in the world that’s orange doesn’t look light-green to me. It does not work like that. This is what most people think when they ask you to name a colour “Ohh, so you see brown instead of green” No, not always. I only said brown because it was my best guess based on what I was looking at.

• I have a very basic idea of what every colour looks like. This is through the colour pencils I’ve used and objects that very accurately and emphatically represent those colours, i.e ones with no complicated shades and hues (Ex: banana for yellow). This is my basis for making any best-guesses of an object’s colour, and unsurprisingly, this is not always reliable or easy to do.

• I can identify artificially coloured objects much easier than colours in nature. This is because the colours in nature usually have complicated shades and hues that I’m not familiar with at all. They aren’t always emphatic and well-defined like most man-made objects around us.

• Like I said before, I sometimes feel like I’m missing out on life because I can’t appreciate the beauty around me to the maximum, especially in nature. I feel like I’d feel more “alive” if I didn’t have this deficiency in perception. Good thing I don’t want to be a pilot or a soldier.

• Most of the time, I totally forget that I’m colourblind. I’ve been living like this for more than 20 years and I’m so used to it. Colourblindness has become the norm for me. It isn’t that bad - I see the exact same thing as you guys, it’s just that I can’t identify a particular property of my surroundings. It’s nowhere near comparable to being blind or having any sensory impairment.

• It can be embarrassing and irritating at times, but in a way it also makes me feel different and unique. I’ve had some people become fascinated with me because I’m colour blind, so I guess that’s the bright side of things (along with having fractionally better night vision than normal people).

• I have trouble with some day-day activities. I remember having issues while working in the chemistry lab once, or when I needed to identify the flavour of something by colour.

Easy mistake

© Hendrik Rebane

For most activities in life, my colour blindness doesn’t affect me; but when it does, it’s pretty amusing to others to see me struggle so much to tell apart two colours that they perceive as being as distinct as bread and doors.

I’ve run into many funny situations when my colour blindness has gotten the better of me. For example, when pairing up socks, I sometimes have to ask my family members whether the two socks I’m holding are the same colour, because dark red and dark green are a nightmare to distinguish!

I can almost always place a colour in a specific section of the spectrum. I will narrow an object down to the possibility of being two (sometimes three) colours. For example, I’ll look at a shirt and narrow it down to either blue or purple; brown or green; red or pink etc. Overall it’s an extremely small handicap in the grand scheme of things. I still see sunsets, and still enjoy every colour in the rainbow. I just don’t see colours as bright as other people do.