11/24/2025
After seeing a post about the color grey (gray?) and another about the retired dandelion yellow Crayola (how delightfully dull), I started thinking about color blindness. My maternal grandfather and one of my brothers are colorblind. My son’s father is also colorblind. My son, however, is the “most” colorblind person I have ever encountered.
When he was learning colors around age 3 he would get them incorrect quite frequently. It was understandably extremely frustrating for him. I caught on quickly that he was likely colorblind, before any family or doctors believed me. He developed an awesome ability to be able to remember the color of an object after being told. For example, if the chairs at that particular table were red, I only needed tell him once and he’d always remember they were red. I call it “relative colors”, similar to relative pitch as opposed to perfect pitch with sound.
For him, these colors are most often indistinguishable until I verify for him: green/gold, green/orange, pink/blue/white, dark blue/purple/black/green, some red/green.
My favorites are green/gold and pink/blue, because he thinks there are a lot of pink cars and gold cars driving around and I’d absolutely love if there were indeed more pink cars and gold cars driving around.
He HATES it when he gets a color wrong and then discloses his colorblindness, only to immediately hear, “What color is this? What color is that?”
This morning, he was asking me about his orange field trip shirt for summer camp. It’s green. I smiled to myself. He and I developed a way of correcting the color for him without him feeling upset or embarrassed, “It’s green, buddy, but it’s the green that looks like orange to you.” Even his little sister has developed this language with him and it’s very sweet to watch the interaction.
I have researched and found there are glasses and now contacts to correct colorblindness. My son says he’d want to wear those. He’s 9 and I am debating an appropriate age for these. The glasses are dark like sunglasses, so they would be conspicuous in school. I believe the contacts appear “normal”.
For interest, here is the Duval color test. I have not confirmed its validity or reliability as far as a diagnostic tool, but thought it might be enjoyably dull.
Would love to hear your results and any experience or advice related to colorblindness. Wishing you all a dull day.
F, size 8 but a 6.5 before pregnancy and still mad about it. Uses too many parentheses. Apparently of the tetrachromat variety. No banana for scale, but can identify a good banana yellow on the chart.
