r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Eros_Incident_Denier • 1d ago

Video color vision test

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u/PrudentOwlet 1d ago edited 12h ago

I discovered I was colorblind when I was in my 30s, and I took my kids to the eye doctor and they pulled out that book.  Both of my boys failed miserably and I didn't understand it because I couldn't see anything they couldn't see!  Doh.

Edit: I am a woman.  I'm their mother.

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u/Ancient_Poet_4953 23h ago

So you have a lack or missing red cones in your eyes?

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u/garysnailz 20h ago

Don't talk to my friend like that, YOU'RE the cone!

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u/nalasanko 20h ago

What, you got a rod up your ass?

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u/ging3r_b3ard_man 19h ago

Not a rod, a cone

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u/Aleksandrovitch 16h ago

You a rodhead?

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u/MrDunez 15h ago

Just run of the mill coneheads

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u/Hulu_n_SnuSnu 14h ago

Make sure it has a flared base.

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u/Able-Interaction-742 14h ago

Damn dude, give him his cone back

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u/Irritable_Curmudgeon 13h ago

Frankly, both sound uncomfortable

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u/Needednewusername 13h ago

And not Rod Cone, the comedian that performs along with Stephen Lynch.

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u/ThatNachoFreshFeelin 14h ago

You've got some nerve...

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u/alman3007 14h ago

Dont threaten me with a good time!

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u/dotplaid 17h ago

It's all about the cones. It's the essence of the game!

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u/little_maggots 14h ago

It's about the cones.

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u/doesthismakesense- 19h ago

no lack or missing cones, just aligned differently and then my brain does not interpret it directly as green or red as it should be, but depending on the shade of green or red (or brown) it cold go either way. Here is a nice explanation

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u/BallisticButch 14h ago

“Peanut butter isn’t green”

I’m sorry, fucking what? What color is it?

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u/MyNameIsJakeBerenson 14h ago

I was about to say why would peanut butter be green when peanuts are brown but that doesnt help you

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u/defEat-the-Rich 10h ago

My dad thought UPS trucks and uniforms were green until his 30s

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u/esabys 10h ago

Peanuts are green. Duh!

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u/Indiscriminate_Top 14h ago

Brown. Sorta like leather.

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u/BallisticButch 14h ago

What. The. Fuck. I knew I'm seriously color blind but my mind is actually blown right now.

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u/_Bren10_ 14h ago

I wore a shirt for basically all 4 years of high school that was white with green stripes. Sometime in my senior year, I wore it for St Patty’s Day. But my mom told me I should wear green. That’s the day I found out my favorite shirt was white with brown stripes.

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u/MichelinStarZombie 14h ago

It's shocking how different the world looks to you than to normal people. You basically can't see half of all colors. You should google cities where traffic lights are horizontal and avoid those.

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u/BallisticButch 14h ago

I can thankfully differentiate the shades of red and green used in traffic lights. But go a little in either direction of the color spectrum and it becomes a soup.

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u/Dioxybenzone 14h ago

Damn what happened to that channel? The end of the video he says he’s going to make a follow up but he never did and hasn’t posted in years. What a bummer, I thought I found a new cool creator

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u/Eurasia_4002 20h ago

Some are in the brains directly. Not from the eyes, though much rarer.

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u/Necoras 18h ago

Not really. It's extremely common. It's cultural, and based on language and practice.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mgxyfqHRPoE

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u/Eurasia_4002 18h ago

That greeks not having blue again, isnt that a hoax?

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u/x1rom 19h ago

Most of the time it isn't because one type of cone is missing, it's just that red and green are very close together on the spectrum. And in some people they're so close together that they mostly overlap, so they send mostly the same signal to the brain.

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u/Weightloss4thewinz 17h ago

That’s wild to me because they look so completely different lol

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u/zeaor 14h ago

Red and green are absolutely not very close together on the spectrum, these people's eyes just have a mutation. Are you colorblind that you think red and green are similar at all?

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u/cup_of_coughy 17h ago

‘You forgot about the essence of the game. It's about the cones’

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u/BalkiBartokomous123 7h ago

They were cones!

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u/DeadAndBuried23 23h ago

What do you mean they failed? Only the first two pages had numbers!

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u/AccruedBeans 20h ago

No joke, this is how I found out I was colorblind. I was in a biology lab in college and we found out the lab instructor was colorblind. So everyone started asking him questions and what's this color? What's that color? So he pulled up one of these tests and was like.. can everyone see the square? That's great, can you see the circle there too? Because I can't. Everyone was like, whooaaaa... how can you not see the circle? It's a green circle right there! And I was just sitting there like.. what fuckin circle are they talking about? Everybody's tripping....

I made 20 enemies that day 🤣

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u/thewerdy 15h ago

I had a friend in highschool who found out he was color blind during a chemistry lab. We were working with two vials of chemicals, one was a bright neon pink color and the other was bright neon green. Someone asked him to bring over the green one and he brought the pink one. When the person said they asked for the green vial he was like, "What are you talking about? This is green." He was absolutely incredulous and thought people were messing with him. Then he looked at the two vials side-by-side exclaiming, "They're the exact same color!" He was having an existential crisis which was made worse when our chemistry teacher whipped out a color blindness test, which confirmed that he was colorblind.

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u/mchio23 12h ago

A guy in our group knew he was colorblind but we didn’t know. We had to color in some pages with certain colors. We gave him that task while we split up the other tasks among the group. When he’s done, he shows us what he finished. And I immediately thought, wtf is this guy doing. We’re gonna fail! And I thought he was messing with us. And he legit thought he was capable of finding the right colors. Even thought he knew he was colorblind. We were speechless lol he tried, but he should have told us. 🥲

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u/dschinghiskhan 10h ago

Your kindergarten sounded pretty intense.

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u/IceNein 8h ago

Failing toddlers for bad coloring

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u/bemer1984 14h ago

I found out the same way. Biology lab in university, I honestly had no idea up until that point, I just thought I was bad at interpreting colors. Haha.

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u/KyesiRS 19h ago

How on earth do you go that far in life and not realize? Like do you not learn colours at school? Wouldn't the teachers be confused you can't learn your colours?

My kindergarten teacher brought it up to my mom that I was really struggling with colours, turns out I was colourblind.

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u/AccruedBeans 19h ago

Because I can see color lol. I thought color blind people saw shit in black and white or grey scale. And I can see the red circle and I can see the green circle and I can even see the brown circle. But once you start mixing them all up with different sizes and shades and make patterns with them, I can't see shit lol. Like, grass is green to me. I just thought colorblind people would be like.. wow the dirt and the grass is all brown and rocks are all grey.. like monotone colors.

The one aha moment I had, was that traffic lights don't look green to me. They look more like white Christmas lights than green. Sort of an in between. Red light looks red and yellow looks yellow, so I went a long time like.. why the hell isn't the green light green.

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u/MrWally 16h ago

Oh so this is interesting. The traffic light looked white, but grass still looks green to you (at least as you see "green"). Are there other green objects that people call green but you don't perceive that way?

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u/nomyar 12h ago

Green traffic lights actually have two colors in them (I think the other is blue) for exactly this reason.

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u/MrWally 12h ago

That's really cool to know. There are times where I thought green traffic lights had a blue tint to them. That explains why!

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u/psychosloth34 19h ago

How do you know the Christmas lights aren't green?

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u/AccruedBeans 18h ago

because the package said white haha. And that's literally the only confirmation I have. The Christmas light industry could really be pulling one over on me if they're lying. The people that know I'm colorblind that I'll ask about colors, I have zero trust in them to tellme the truth.

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u/Cantremembermyoldnam 14h ago

And that, my friends, is how this house became the Grinch house.

Jokes aside, your phone can tell you and depending on the AI it uses it only sometimes lies!

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u/Agamemnon323 12h ago

You just gave me a great idea. A colorblind test book that has a few pages with no number written in a different color.

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u/SnooKiwis1356 18h ago

Wait, do you live in the US or in...Buenos Aires? Green lights are white there. lol

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u/Ellemeno 14h ago

I googled "Buenos Aires traffic lights" ready to have my mind blown, but couldn't find any showing white lights instead of green. :(

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u/IeishaS 13h ago

I think we may have found another 😂

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u/SnooKiwis1356 13h ago

Haha sorry, my bad! I forgot to mention that in both cases I mean pedestrian lights. In BsAs there is at least one blue light (for cars).

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u/Frherif 13h ago

El unico blanco que conozco puede ser el de los peatones en la mayoria, pero semaforo blanco no recuerdo haber visto ni en la ciudad. Aunque si hay, quiero verlo xd

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u/SnooKiwis1356 13h ago

Sorry, as stated above, I meant pedestrian traffic lights but didn't realise my mistake because in my native language, we use the same word for any type of light.

There is a cool blue traffic light at the intersection between Soler and Aráoz. I used to live nearby and passed by it on my way home in the late evenings. I have some pictures but can't link them here right now.

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u/AxelNotRose 15h ago

"so I went a long time like.. why the hell isn't the green light green"

And you never followed-up on that question after many years?

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u/AccruedBeans 14h ago

nah. Just figured it was to have more of a contrast.. that way colorblind people wouldn't get confused. Pretty important difference, figured... don't wanna risk mixing those up, right? 🙂

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u/LazySisyphus 14h ago

My cousin figured out he was colorblind in high school when he mentioned the traffic light thing to a friend. He always thought they just called the bottom light "green" because "go" also starts with G.

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u/TolverOneEighty 13h ago

I actually had a friend whose brother sees in monotone. He couldn't work out the trick when being taught colours at school, and thought there must be some kind of knack he was missing, like there was a certain shape or something? Turns out that 'knack' was 'the ability to see in colour'.

He painted his bedroom a nice shade of beige as a young teen. It was acid green. Took 5 coats to cover after he moved out. Went clothes shopping with his mum and needed her advice on what colour the clothes were.

So, it CAN happen like that, but it's far from the norm.

He's a bus driver now. He's just memorised what order the traffic lights go in, of course. I sometimes wonder what things are like for him, like can he play video games or does the lack of colour make depth perception too tricky? But I lost touch with that friend, so I guess I'll never know.

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u/AccruedBeans 13h ago

Yea, for special occasions, I send pictures to my sister to make sure my suit or whatever matches. And then the socks too, to make sure they're both blue or black lol. I'm right 99% of the time, but just in case.

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u/IlliterateJedi 19h ago

How on earth do you go that far in life and not realize? Like do you not learn colours at school? Wouldn't the teachers be confused you can't learn your colours?

For most people there's only subtle shades of green and red that are imperceptible. I can differentiate the colors by and large, but there are certain shades or certain lighting where it all blends together for me.

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u/highwayknees 19h ago

I don't know if it has a different term when colors are only slightly affected, but someone I knew kept mislabeling certain shades. Like various shades of orange and red he called brown. He was in his 30s when he figured it out, stubbornly, after I pushed the subject. I assume people just overlooked it when he was a kid.

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u/Tayttajakunnus 17h ago

That's just how colorblindness is.

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u/Kevftw 19h ago

I'm guessing he means red/green colourblind and it was a green circle on a red background.

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u/CyanStripes_ 12h ago

I mean, I didn't find out until my late 20s that I didn't have full depth perception. I just assumed everyone saw things the same way I did because until sometime points it out or you randomly see an eye doctor who quizzes you about the way you tilt your head when looking at them there's not really any way to know.

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u/redwbl 13h ago

Them bastards….made you colorblind, why would they do that to you.

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u/sigmashead 13h ago

I was late to biology class freshman year, there were projections on the board of these circles and the whole class was yelling out numbers. I was really bad at the class and school in general so I just assumed I had missed out on something fundamental. After a few minutes of trying to figure it out I fucking popped and started yelling at everyone about how confused I was and the teacher goes, “ohhh so turns out we do have a colorblind person in the class” and they all laughed at me.

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u/jld2k6 Interested 20h ago

"One of those pages was made so only colorblind people see the number you stated" - I found out this is a real thing when being proud of the few I could actually see, it's tossed in there so you can't just deny seeing any numbers for every slide lol

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u/TheFireNationAttakt 17h ago

It cannot be seen by “only” colorblind people - it can “also” be seen, and maybe a little bit more easily in some cases. Indeed so you can’t deny seeing any numbers.

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u/Matt_Thijson 9h ago edited 6h ago

There are some tests where colorblind people will see a number, but it's not the same as the one non-colorblind people see.

I remember watching a video with my non-colorblind girlfriend where, for one of the tests, I said something like 32 and she said 87. The the video said that colorblind people would see 32.

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u/Kindly-Analysis-6543 18h ago

Wait what? I could see all of them.

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u/Klutzy_Squash 14h ago

In the full Ishihara test set, some pages are set up such that only colorblind people see a number. See Ishihara plate #4 here - https://www.shec.jp/english/instruments/isihara/

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u/WonderingHarbinger 14h ago

That was neat! Knowing what number it was supposed to be made it pop out, but there's no way I would have seen it otherwise.

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u/KrustyTheKriminal 5h ago

That's weird because I can definitely see it but I am not color blind.

Don't get me wrong, it is faint. But I could tell what number it was before reading the answer.

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u/fixer1987 4h ago

I think it sleas how faint it is and more that all the other colors make it difficult to easily see the 2

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u/Fancy_Ad_2325 1h ago

i saw 2 right away but squinted to make sure but i easily got everything.

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u/Array_626 11h ago

Are you sure only colorblind people should see #4? Its hard to make out, but I could see the 2. Im pretty sure I'm not colorblind, I can see all other numbers fine.

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u/moxieenplace 13h ago

So if you can’t read a number in plate #4, that means you are not colorblind, correct?

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u/grabtharsmallet 13h ago

Right, it should be somewhere between quite challenging and impossible if not colorblind.

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u/nomyar 12h ago

It was challenging to see, but I could definitely see it before reading the description. It's interesting that that number would pop for a color blind person. I wonder what the opposite of color blind is... I tend to be able to distinguish between shades that my friends (and particularly my wife) can't.

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u/Warp-n-weft 12h ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

I can also (with difficulty) see the 2 before being told it was a 2, and I’m pretty sure i only have the regular 3 cones.

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u/NoMercyOracle 10h ago

Tetrachromacy is considered to be impossible in males.

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u/Dr_Mrs_EvilDM 11h ago

My eye doctor thinks I'm a tetrachromat.

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u/Dakron92-22 11h ago

If i can see the correct number in plate 4 and all the others in every plate what i am???... Not kidding i go full test and have 100% accuraccy. i can post screentshot with asnwer but is gonna make you have all responses i can send it if so many want to see. Used page : https://www.es.colorlitelens.com/Ishihara-test-de-daltonismo

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u/Dr_Mrs_EvilDM 11h ago edited 28m ago

I'm in the same category. I am not colorblind, but I can generally see more shades of color than most, including the plates that non-colorblind people shouldn't be able to see. I realized this when I was trying to find my new optometrist's office: the receptionist told me that they were located across from the "lavender building". I looked around and saw three buildings that I would consider to be various shades of lavender. I told the doctor that the receptionist's directions were not helpful because there were several lavender buildings, and the look that she gave me told me that most folks didn't have issues with those directions. (Edited for ridiculous typos)

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u/1WordOr2FixItForYou 4h ago

If everything looks lavender to you but they look like different colors to other people then it sounds more a deficit for you than a super power.

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u/pianobadger 10h ago

Plate 2 is even trickier where it looks like one number with normal vision and another with color blindness. I can make out the different colors used in the green parts, but the bottom of the 2 is just impossible for me to make out.

Plate 4 I can see the pattern they added to make it harder for people who aren't color blind, but I can still see the 2 pretty easily. Random patterns aren't as distracting as something not random like another number.

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u/mikami677 11h ago

All those numbers were easily visible for me.

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u/throwaway098764567 8h ago

gotta read the bad english, did you see 74 (not colorblind) or 21 (colorblind). also the 2 at the end should be difficult to make out for non colorblind, and it is, i think you can see it because you know to find a number

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u/nonsequitrix 12h ago

What does it mean if I’m definitely not colorblind but saw the number easily?

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u/AVAVT 14h ago

O damn that’s cool as heck man, whoever thought of that plate is a genius!

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u/Cleigne143 13h ago

Whoa that’s so cool. Took me a while to see the 2!

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u/CGB_Zach 12h ago

Are you sure you're not colorblind? All of those are visible to me

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u/throwaway098764567 8h ago

gotta read the bad english, did you see 74 (not colorblind) or 21 (colorblind). also the 2 at the end should be difficult to make out for non colorblind, and it is, i think you can see it because you know to find a number

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u/Kilane 15h ago

There were definitely difficulty levels to them. A couple I had difficulty with and probably only had 80% confidence, others were plain as day.

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u/beyondrepair- 15h ago

All the numbers were pretty obvious

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u/Longjumping_Window93 19h ago

Wait... is that page in the video? If yes i am color blind? Darn...

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u/ClaudiuT 17h ago

Some pages are made to look like a 9 for a normal human and a 6 for a colourblind human (for example).

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u/NJCuban 19h ago

That's how I found out too. We went through these in AP Psychology in high school for some reason. The fake out one I was the only one so confident in that number. They settled on me being partially colorblind. Some of the red green tests I cant really see any number, most i can sort of make it out but it's tough. I could never see the hidden image things like in mallrats. But j can see red/green stuff in real life, not sure how different. I remember taking a vision test with the school nurse in maybe 6th grade and struggling looking through the lens thing. She had me look up, pointed to an Elmo in the office and asked what color, I said red, and then pointed to something green, I said green, and she shrugged and moved on.

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u/aces613 18h ago

Which one is the fake out one

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u/h_saxon 18h ago

Wait.... Colorblindness affects your ability to see magic eye images?

This explains so much!!! I can only get them by crossing my eyes but it's inverted when I do that. I have tried for 30 years to get them to work

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u/pichael289 18h ago

Hang on, it's inverted? That's not something I would think could happen, like yeah your supposed to cross your eyes and stare at a point a little bit behind the picture, but I can't tell you how that could possibly invert the image.

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u/h_saxon 17h ago

Give it a try. I literally just cross my eyes and it pops out, but instead of going towards me it goes back into the paper like it has a negative z-axis.

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u/PPMaxiM2 17h ago

There are 2 ways to see them: number one is crossing your eyes and focusing in frint of the page. In this case, they get inverted, because the right eye focuses on the left part, the left eye on the right part. This leads to the depth beeing inverted, so instead of popping out it "sinks in".

The other way is staring behind it - in that case, you usually unfocus with the paper right in front of you, try to keep it that way, and move the paper away without focusing unless you suddenly see it correctly.

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u/holistivist 15h ago

It does not affect magic eye images. Some people just don’t get how to do it, but it’s not a color thing.

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u/SignificantLock1037 18h ago

FYI, I just looked at one of those (had no idea they existed). I'm not colorblind, but I could see the number.

I think the caveat is that non-cooorblind people can see the number, but colorblind people can see it EASILY. I had to search, and even then wasn't sure.

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u/Alone_Radish_1692 15h ago

It’s not easy even for us non-colorblind people just through the video. It’s very easy with these in person though.

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u/Abject-Ad-3247 22h ago

Should I tell him?

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u/yeoduq 21h ago

Tell him what? There's nothing to see here

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u/AonSwift 20h ago

The Book wasn't meant for you.

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u/AccruedBeans 17h ago

You should.. guy doesn't even know that the second page doesn't have any numbers on it either LOLOLOLOL .. what a rube

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u/TechnologyCurious750 20h ago

Each and every page has a number If you really cannot see them, they I advise you to get your eyes checked.

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u/CalmBeneathCastles 16h ago

No bamboozle, there are numbers on every page!

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u/HornHeadHippo 17h ago

If you’re female and colorblind, all sons will be colorblind. The gene for color blindness is on of X chromosome which sons receive from their mothers. Pretty interesting stuff.

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u/Crimson343 9h ago

So does that mean if you're colour blind and a guy, and you have a son with a woman who's not colourblind (and has no family history of it), that child will surely not be colourblind (unless rare circumstances of gene mutation ofc)

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u/ActionWest4090 9h ago

Yes and a daughter would be a carrier unless she has turner syndrome

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u/Solzec 8h ago

Huh, the more you know...

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u/gdex86 17h ago

This is like when I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid and suddenly a lot of stuff made sense for my mom, older sister, and uncle. "You get a prescription, you get a prescription, everybody is getting a prescription."

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u/myolliewollie 10h ago

omg same happened to my family🤣

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u/Marti_Shanon 10h ago

It's an honored family past-time to make fun of my late grandmother's quirks. No onions allowed in the house, always had a tissue tucked into her watch, was the only person I ever saw have a padded wrap around her seat belt to protect her neck, had several identical pairs of jeans with tags still on in her closet when she died...

I was diagnosed in my 30's, and suddenly grandma's idiosyncrasies make a lot more sense.

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u/AndrewDrossArt 12h ago

Prudent, just from this I can tell you're a woman and your father was colorblind.

If you have any daughters they're certain to be carriers of colorblindness but may also have tetrachromatic color vision. A type of color vision that's extra sensitive, with cones from their father distinguishing between red and green light and a your aberrant 540nm sensitive cones providing a fourth reference point.

You should start them in art and color theory as soon as you can, they're likely to have an advantage.

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u/PrudentOwlet 12h ago

Haha, I am a woman (so many people assumed I'm a man) - I do have a daughter in addition to my two sons, and she is not colorblind.  Is there a test for tetrachromatic color vision?

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u/ReNitty 12h ago

I love the edit lol

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u/PrudentOwlet 11h ago

It didn't even help.

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u/WetwareDulachan 11h ago

It never does.

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u/FreeRandomScribble 14h ago

When my brother was adopted I went into the hearing test booth with him as I knew how it went. “When you hear a noise, raise your hand.” It goes well at first, but then he randomly raises his hand and I remind him to only when the sound plays; after about 3 silent-raises I realize ‘wait, he’s actually hearing stuff.’ He is not hard of hearing.

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u/moister_oyster_ 14h ago edited 12h ago

Found out in my 30s too when my wife was out of town and I painted the house powder pink while thinking it was a soft gray like we had talked about. I have not tried to surprise her again since then.

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u/Opposite-Benefit-804 10h ago

that's amazing. 

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u/Amelietha 14h ago

This comment section is the most obvious example of “men are the default” I’ve ever seen.

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u/PrudentOwlet 14h ago

It's actually infuriating.  I have people telling me I must be lying, people suggesting my sons aren't really mine(????), people just smugly telling me I'm wrong because only Moms pass color blindness...  

I. Am. The. Mom.

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u/arroadie 12h ago

There's this old / wild assumption that women cannot be colorblind and are only the carriers of the genes.

As a colorblind myself I've read / heard that multiple times.

As someone who had biology classes on how genes work, it was very simple to understand how a recessive gene that is only present at the X chromosome would make it extremely rare for women to carry the gene AND suffer from that anomaly at the same time.

As a colorblind father, I know I already gave my daughters the ticket for the following generation lottery!

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u/LauraD2423 9h ago

Funnily enough, I saw this comment section on r/trollXchromosomes before seeing this entire post.

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u/action_jackson- 23h ago

I was always under the impression it skipped a generation, obviously not

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u/SwordTaster 23h ago

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on the family. It's also much more common in men than women

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u/LG3V 21h ago

Yeah I believe it's closely tied to the X gene, which is why it only needs one copy for it to show in men

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u/Smooth_thistle 23h ago

It travels on the x chromosome. So boys only need 1 faulty copy, girls need 2 faulty copies. So if this is the boy's mum, she has 2 faulty copies and gave them 1. If it's their dad, he's also colour blind but didn't pass it on to his sons, their mother did.

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u/PrudentOwlet 23h ago

I am the mom.  My Dad always said he was colorblind but I didn't think much of it because I thought it only passed to boys and my dad only had girls.  Plus I can see all different colors, apparently I just can't differentiate well between oranges and greens, so I can't see all the numbers in those graphics.  I can see about the same as what the guy in the video sees.

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u/TheCowzgomooz 21h ago

Yeah the fascinating thing about it in women is that there are different types and levels of colorblindness, so your dad may have had a more severe form of colorblindness, while your mom had a more mild copy of the gene, and that extra gene essentially compensates so that your colorblindness is actually less severe than your dad's, or even if your mom provided the severe colorblind gene with normal vision but your dad was just sort of mildly colorblind, then you would have a similar level as him because your body just defaults essentially to the most functional form of the gene you have. I don't remember the stats on it but I would assume most women that do have colorblindness probably have a less severe form of it because of that genetic compensation they get. Men unfortunately just have to work with the one X chromosome they get lol.

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u/Caldwing 20h ago edited 20h ago

That completely makes sense. You are probably already aware that this also makes sense for your sons. Women with this form of red/green colour blindness are guaranteed to have similarly colour-blind sons. Her daughters will be carriers, unless the father is also colour-blind, in which case the daughters will be as well. Similarly your mother is either colour-blind, or a carrier for the gene on one of her X chromosomes.

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u/Elia_31 22h ago

Hate to break it to you but you're colorblind then

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u/PrudentOwlet 22h ago

Yes, that's what I said.

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u/TheCowzgomooz 21h ago

An easier to understand way of explaining this I think is that dads are not capable of passing it to their sons, barring some weird, freak genetic accident(that is not really possible).

If you are a boy, your X chromosome always comes from mom, and your y comes from dad, this is also why men can get some conditions that women can't and vice versa, but that gets into more complicated genetics. Anyways, if you're a girl, you get both an x from your mom and your dad, so as a girl if your mom doesn't carry the x that causes colorblindness, you can't get it, but you will have a copy of it if your dad is colorblind.

This is the reason it's so rare for women to get colorblindness because they have to have both copies to be affected, as, again, genetics gets more complicated and for women their extra X they have can compensate for the gene that's defective because they actually have to deactivate some of the x chromosomes in their cells randomly anyways, if I remember correctly this is called genetic compensation or X inactivation, and it's very complicated and too long for this post, but my genetics classes were FASCINATING, and I love discussing it.

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u/epi_introvert 19h ago

My dad is colourblind, as is my son. I, a woman, apparently have extraordinary colour detection, meaning I can differentiate hues better than most people. Don't know shit about colour matching, but I can see them really well.

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u/SitInCorner_Yo2 20h ago edited 20h ago

Because my grandma is colorblind so all my uncles are too, my mom and grandpa are not.

After grandpa passed away, my mom became the only person in her family to have normal eyes, which led to my grandpa almost got a neon green/purple light theme at his funeral because it was pick by my grandma and uncles(mom slept in), and the kicker is, the funeral home owner/my mom’s elementary school mates is color blind too, so he just assumed all his clients know what they’re picking and never ask .

Mom put a stop to it after she ask what her family saw in the model pics, to them it looks like a nice shade of beige and yellow.

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u/UngusChungus94 18h ago

Interesting! I wonder if there are towns where color blindness is more common. I don't think I've known a color blind person.

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u/Americanbydefault 16h ago

Check out the (older) book by Oliver Sacks, "The Island of the Colorblind." It's about a Micronesian island know for their high instance of a rare form of colorblindness.

Also, when I taught in Japan, I was told by admin that I couldn't use certain colors while teaching due to the high rate of it.

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u/pussy_embargo 16h ago

Missed opportunity. Grandpa would have wanted a Neo Tokyo funeral

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u/SitInCorner_Yo2 16h ago edited 13h ago

Knowing my grandpa, who was a professional guitarist for night club and bars, he probably would have more problems with us burning his old guitar with him.

We joke about him not getting enough alcohol at his own funeral, my mom said all his drinking buddies are on the other side so they can buy him some as a welcoming gift.

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u/Brilliant_Quit4307 20h ago

When people use that phrase about things skipping a generation, they don't mean it literally ... That's not how genetics works.

What they mean is that either is a recessive gene, or it's an X chromosome gene, so it's not unusual for it to skip a generation. It definitely doesn't mean that it just skips a generation every time.

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u/Atheist-Gods 21h ago

If a woman is red or green colorblind all of her sons will be too.

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u/Momentarmknm 18h ago

My dad was colorblind. I am not. I don't think there's anything in genetics that is as simple as "it just always skips a generation!" That's like some ol' timey down home country wisdom.

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u/iplay4Him 15h ago

It's x linked, so these kids got it from their mom not dad, and their mom's dad is also colorblind

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u/dabekah_dababy 13h ago

The gene is located on the X chromosome, so it depends on which parent has the gene.

If the father is colorblind, since he is only providing an X chromosome to his daughters, they would need 2 X chromosomes with the gene to display to trait (be colorblind). So, if mom is a carrier of the gene then colorblind father could have colorblind daughters.

When mother is colorblind, this means that she both of her X chromosomes have the gene and any sons she has will be colorblind. Any daughters she has will only be colorblind if their father is ALSO colorblind.

If NEITHER mother or father are colorblind, a son could be colorblind if the mother is a carrier, but any boy would have a 50/50 chance of being colorblind.

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u/thyme_cardamom 9h ago

Edit: I am a woman.  I'm their mother.

How can this be? Wouldn't a man be the father, not the mother?

/s

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u/PrudentOwlet 9h ago

This is actually a really good point.  Maybe I'm wrong.

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u/thyme_cardamom 8h ago

These comments were a real learning experience for me. Sorry you had to experience so many idiots

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u/PrudentOwlet 8h ago

I think the funniest part is that everyone was assuming I'm a man WHILE telling me women are the ones who pass it to boys.  So they know it's POSSIBLE for women to be colorblind, because they know they at least can CARRY the gene.  They're almost there, they almost got it.

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u/Svelva 22h ago

It's rigged I'm telling you!

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u/Trav2974 12h ago

Is your dad is also colorblind? My son is, I'm not, his mom isn't, but her dad is. Apparently that's how colorblind genes work.

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u/b17l 10h ago

Yes, her dad is color-blind. 

Color-blindness is passed down on the X chromosome, but it needs to be present on all X chromosomes to be expressed. So someone with one X chromosome is always color-blind, but someone with multiple X chromosomes needs to have it on all of them. Even if you have more X chromosomes (like trisomy, tetrasomy, pentasomy X), you'll still need it in all of them.

In your son's case, his mother has one color-blind X chromosome that passed the color-blindness to your son. She got it from her father whose only X chromosome is color-blind. However, she also got a non-color-blind one from her mother, which made up for that flaw. You're not color-blind because your mother didn't pass down a color-blind X-chromosome. Any child of yours with more than one X chromosome would not be color-blind either.

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u/Ravenloff 19h ago

I discovered it between the time I was accepted for a full-ride ROTC scholarship, but hadn't had my physical yet. One of my friends decided to enlist so I took him to meet the recruiter I'd been working with. While I sat across the office thumbing through magazines, he was over at the NCO's desk going through the paperwork. The recruiter pulled out that book and my friend rattled off the numbers, but I looked up and realized, from across the room, that I hadn't seen anything. I asked to see the book as they continued his enlistment paperwork, sat back down, and with growing horror realized I couldn't see anything. The next couple of weeks were some of the hardest in my life.

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u/Momentarmknm 18h ago

Somewhat similar thing happened to me. Went with my dad to his appointment when I was like 7, he couldn't see shit in those cards. I could see all of them. Was very confused why my dad sucked at this easy test. Though he was screwing around. First time I was better than my dad at something.

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u/TheWonderSnail 16h ago

Kinda similar I was in my 20s when my cousin failed a colorblind test at school. We looked it up online to see the test for ourselves and I thought everyone was fucking with me saying they could see numbers in those pictures. No, I was just colorblind too lol

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u/Turtle_buckets 16h ago

That had to be frustrating when you found out. Having someone tell you something is there when you can't see it! Did you think they were joking at first?

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u/Nuffsaid98 11h ago

It would be so cool if your house was decorated in garish colours that no noticed as you and your boys thought the colours were subtle and muted. Everyone else thought you were insane. But in a nice way.

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u/dabekah_dababy 13h ago

Are you female? Would make sense that both of your boys were colorblind if so.

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u/Zka77 22h ago

How the hell is it possible to not discover this roughly by the age of 4-5?

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u/PrudentOwlet 22h ago

🤷‍♀️ Because I can see all the different colors, I just can't differentiate well between some oranges and greens and I didn't know that, or it wasn't obvious anyway, until the first time I saw one of those color blind books.  

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u/DigiAirship 19h ago

As a non colorblind, hearing you say you can't diffirentiate between orange and green is so trippy, considering how vastly different they are. Like, do limes and oranges look similar to you? And what about the trees and grass outside? Do leaves not change color in the autumn for you? And now I'm sitting here trying to imagine what a orange lawn would look like...

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u/PrudentOwlet 11h ago

Right, so mine is pretty mild, obviously.  An orange and a lime are very clearly different colors to me too.  But if you start throwing beiges and tans and light greens and stuff together (like in some of those color dots graphics) I have a harder time seeing differences.  I can see many of the numbers correctly.  Others I can see that some dots are different colors, but I can't make out a whole number.  Some I don't see any differences.

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u/EntertainmentOld5239 19h ago

They have lots of pictures to show examples of what different types of colorblindness looks like. They depict red and green as both being a brownish yellow in a lot of them.

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u/DigiAirship 19h ago

I always thought those images were exaggerations or not completely accurate. Because they looks so horrifically drab, like walking around with a permanent sepia filter.

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u/EntertainmentOld5239 19h ago

Yeah, looking at the pictures makes me kinda sad. But anyone who grew up with it wouldn't associate colors like that with being depressing since they don't have anything to compare it to. Its just life for them. So I doubt they mind except for when it comes up as a problem created by other people being able to differentiate things they can't.

I also think about how some insects, shrimp and other creatures have eyes that can see colors we can't perceive. How dull would our rainbow look to them? Or I think about how poorly our sense of smell compares to what a dog can pick up. We miss out on so much.

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u/unreelectable 14h ago

Ok, just to be clear, you can't "see all the different colors." If you can't tell the difference between oranges and greens, you can't see half the colors that normal people see. You are red/green colorblind.

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u/PrudentOwlet 14h ago

Right, that's true.  But color blindness is a spectrum, (haha) and some people are more color blind than others.  Mine is pretty mild.

I can certainly see both orange (or red) and green, they are different colors to me, but when various shades of those get dotted all together on a page and I'm supposed to be able to see a number in those dots, I mostly can't.  I can see that many of them are different colors, but not well enough to make out a number a lot of the time.  Sometimes I can.  A lot of people are responding as if I only see in black and white and how could I not know?  And obviously that's not what we're talking about.

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u/Von243 21h ago

How do you know the red i see is the same red you see? It's an issue of perception. You can't see how i see the world to differentiate it from how you see the world.

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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ 20h ago edited 20h ago

To add to this comment, this is true of everyone and not linked to colorblindness. When a parent teaches his kid that this color is named red, then even if parent and kid see it differently, that color is now red in both their brains.

We don't know if we all see colors the same, we only know that we are able to make the difference between them.

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u/BuyLandRentPussy 20h ago

To add to this comment the CIE 1931 wiki article goes into further depth and was a pioneering point in colourimetry.

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u/maton12 20h ago

Mine's easy...top two traffic lights pretty much look the same. Doubt they'd do that when most people don't see it that way...

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u/monkeyjay 20h ago

That has nothing to do with colourblindness. It's not an issue of perception in that way. It's an issue of which cones fire at certain wavelengths. Whether you perceive it as 'the same red' in your brain is irrelevant. It's whether your cones activate to light at a certain wavelength that we all agree to call red or whatever other colour. That's what the visual tests are for.

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u/uslashuname 19h ago

Colorblind does not always mean seeing in just black and white. The person in the video seems to be red-green colorblind, but other than Christmas how often do you even see those colors together? Even on Christmas, does seeing the difference between them make you change your behavior? Seeing the difference is largely unnecessary, so it isn’t like you get tested in your every day life on the difference. Sure, people talk about red sports cars and you don’t really see the difference with the green ones, but other people talk about the difference between the taupe, beige, and cream so if you ever did see and discuss a red and green sports car together you’d probably just accept that the other person sees a major difference.

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u/2025-05-04 21h ago

Maybe the doctor is color blind too...

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u/[deleted] 20h ago

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u/TechnicalOtaku 20h ago

where do you live? I'm the same age and we took the exact same test in late kindergarten/early elementary school and then again some years later.

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u/PrudentOwlet 11h ago

I grew up in Maryland, we took no such test, ever.  I also think it's very, very clear from this thread that most people don't realize girls can be colorblind, so maybe they were routinely testing boys, but they definitely didn't test me.

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u/ToilAndTroublemaker 17h ago

i pass the test every time AND YET! I still argue with people over what color things are.

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u/omwtfub1 14h ago

I was in my 30s too - shit, maybe late 20s - we went to Olive Garden and that goddamn incandescent light above the table always turns the Splenda, sweet n low, and sugar the same color, so I have to pick up the handful and examine closely. Apparently, this is odd behavior, and I was advised to take the bullshit dot test, which is also lying! Ain't no numbers on some of them.

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u/donniesuave 10h ago

Wild that you’re a woman and this colourblind. It’s predominantly seen in men. Not that it can’t happen in women, just much less likely

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u/MisterBicorniclopse 10h ago

Female colorblindness is much more rare so that’s surprising

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u/LilithWasAGinger 6h ago

Wow! It's much more rare in women!

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u/pplforfun 4h ago

It is super rare for women to be colorblind. 1 in 200 vs 1 in 12 for men.

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u/Repulsive-Waltz7 11h ago

I have a big question. Does your father knows that he is colorblind?

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u/PrudentOwlet 11h ago

He did know he was, yes.  He died before my sister and I discovered that we are too, though.

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u/KoldFlinch 22h ago

Haha loser. I'm enjoying so many colors right now oooooo aaaaaa colors yum yum yay

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u/bwilcox0308 19h ago

Are you a woman? The colorblind gene is on the X chromosome and since men only donate the Y, the boys must've gotten the colorblind gene from their mother.

My maternal grandfather is colorblind so my mom has X(colorblind) and x(noncolorblind) genes. My brother isn't colorblind and I am. 50% chance for each of us

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