For me, The Dress was no laughing matter. As a color blind person, I’m never certain if I’m looking at red or brown, green or blue, and please don’t print yellow text on blue paper unless you want to bring me to tears.

Now Valspar and EnChroma think they have a pair of glasses that can, more or less, fix my vision when I wear them. I have my doubts.

I have consistently failed color blindness tests for more than 30 years. The first time was when I was 15. I noticed that I couldn’t see the blackboard from the back of my classroom and had my mother make an eye appointment. They tested my eyes, which turned out to be nearsighted and, as a matter of routine, they also examined my ability to see colors.

As far as I knew, I saw colors just fine.

Commonly known as the Ishihara Color test, and developed by ophthalmologist Ishihara Shinobou almost a century ago, the test consists of circular color charts. Each chart is filled with colorful dots of varying sizes. Hidden within those dots are numbers.

Those without color blindness see the numbers easily.

People like me? Well, let’s just say that at the end of my test, the optometrist smiled warmly at me and told me I had answered every test perfectly — for a color blind person. He said I had red/green color blindness, but added that it could impact browns and yellows, as well.

I remember being shocked and momentarily upset. I was blind-ish, I thought. As a 15-year-old I was ready to concoct all sorts of self-sympathy scenarios revolving around my color deficiency as a ruse to meet girls — until I remembered I could see perfectly well (with my new glasses) and other people had real problems.

My color deficiency hasn’t caused me major trouble. I’m an amateur artist who can’t mix paint colors (in drawing I stick with primary colors), I often miss-match clothing colors and sometimes can’t see the color of the clothes people around me are wearing.

When “The Dress” happened, I joked that this was a plot to make me feel badly about my condition (for the record, the original photo made it look gold and white).

I’m color blind and am now convinced #DressGate2015 is a conspiracy to make me feel bad about myself.

— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) February 27, 2015

Paint manufacturer Valspar read my lament on Twitter and decided to let me try their new color blindness-correcting glasses, which are actually manufactured by EnChroma.

The aviator-style sun glasses are essentially filters designed to cut out specific portions of the visible color spectrum. This supposedly removes wavelengths that overlap too much and cause the color confusion. According to Valspar, they are specifically designed to help my form of red-green color blindness by removing the messy middle ground between these two colors. The fine print on the frames also claims “100% UV-Blocking.”

A more technical term for the type of color blindness I have is trichromacy. The more severe kind of color blindness is called dichromacy and it’s where entire photopigments in the eye are missing or completely overlap. The EnChroma glasses won’t help with dichromacy.

Valspar sent along a touching video featuring real color blind people (Valspar insists they are not actors) trying out the glasses (embedded above). It’s never made clear the severity of their color blindness, though one would assume they all suffer from varying degrees of trichromacy.

Despite the commonly-held belief that women are color blindness carriers, not sufferers, the video does feature a color blind woman. A Valspar representative explained, “Red-green color blindness is inherited and is predominantly a male disability (8%), but if the mother is a carrier and the father is color blind, there is a 50% chance that daughters will be color blind. This makes it a lot rarer in women (0.4%).”

Test drive

I don’t consider my color blindness much of an issue, but I was still anxious to try the glasses. I imagined the filters revealing a previously hidden world of vibrant colors. I’d weep and hug myself (since no one from Valspar was nearby.)

I put the Valspar glasses on over my own glasses so I could see clearly. Then I looked around.

Nothing.

Everything looked the same. Maybe my colorblindness is so mild that these lenses could not possibly help. I tried a different tack. Online, there are numerous Ishihara tests. This is a good one. To set a baseline, I took the test without the Valspar glasses. The first test shows a vibrant orange “16” in a field of green dots. That I could see.

The remaining seven tests were a struggle. Ultimately, I got two-out-of-eight right (I guessed at one), the last screen recommended I see an eye care professional.

Next I put on the glasses and retook the test. I did worse. I tried removing my glasses and got close enough to the screen to see the test clearly. I got one-out-of-eight.

I tried the test a few more times to see if I could improve my score. Nope. Even with the Valspar glasses, I couldn’t see more than a hint of the hidden numbers. It’s funny, but also frustrating. Am I really missing that much color from my life?

Dr. Robert Freedman, who is an ophthalmologist in Salem, Mass. and clinical instructor of ophthalmology at Tufts New England Medical Center, told me that the glasses likely work by making one wavelength a little brighter and the other a little less, so you can better tell the difference between colors.

“In point of fact you are not going to see reds or greens any better. You’re just going to know which one is which,” said Dr. Freedman in an interview.

He was not surprised by my Ishihara results. “Everything in the Ishihara test is monochromatic. There’s the same amount of light in all the colors and numbers,” he told me, and recommended I take the glasses outside into the real world where I might have better or more dramatic results

Outside, streetlights and other colorful objects looks largely unchanged. Okay, the red and green traffic lights were a tiny bit brighter. Yellow cabs, however, looked slightly orange.

In a mid-town clothing store, I scanned the racks with the glasses on and off. I couldn’t see a difference. These glasses did not change my life, nor should I have expected them to. Valspar’s claim, noted Dr. Freedman, “may be totally bogus. I’m not sure people who have red-green color blindnesss have trouble in the real world.”

As for “The Dress,” it looks the same with Valspar’s glasses on or off. What colors I see is my business.

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