I know someone that didn't realize they were red/green colorblind until they were a teenager.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Talking about colour blindness is a bit misleading as tried colour blindness is very rare but having a red-green colour deficiency is quite normal, men having some 14.5% prevalence. (Women only like less than a percent)
I have diagnosable deficiency, but it really doesn't come up in real life unless there's like a really deep metallic colored car which might be harder to correctly identify or cause a bit of debate.
Like you wouldn't call someone blind because they can't read subtitles from a somewhat faraway TV without glasses. You'd just say they don't have the greatest vision.
I mean they literally do. How do I know your colors are the same as mine?
I only knew in my university medical checkup. I'd always wondered why there was a strip of white on color wheels, so that explained that. Turns out that's just cyan.
Cyan is fake! So is pink
Have been working with two red-green blind people for some years. They told me they didn't know for the longest time. One of them became an electrician, the other one was disqualified since he couldn't differentiate between red and green. That's how he found out. The electrician guy found out years later once he questioned why his colleagues get the different coloured wires right all the time but he didn't. Both of them see red and green in different grey shades, they told me something like blacker greys are red and whiter greys are green.
Ha! I had an electrical engineer friend with a similar story. He thought manufacturers were idiots for colour coding their cables with shades that are so close to each other.
I think he'd been in the industry for about 5 years when he found out...
That's hilarious I love it. My prior coworkers were so confused by pink & lime green and those sorts of similar shades.
I had wired Ethernet in my whole house. Feeling like a complete dunce at having to give 3 tries for each termination. Before realizing two years later that i was red-green colorblind.
After that diagnosis i felt so fucking validated.
You got my meme bro.
What if what my brain interprets as green yours interprets as hot purple?
I think this is exactly what is called qualia, what you see may be different from what I see, and there's no way to ever tell.
As a kid, I thought colour blindness/deficiency worked like that, until I learned that in this case people have trouble distinguishing colours, not naming them
Salads would be weird
if your whole life salads looked like that they wouldn't be weird at all.
I get that it's a joke, but bottom line? The names of colors are just the way our brains interpret specific wavelengths, and wavelength is objective. So it doesn't really matter, because the wavelength of the photon is the same regardless of how our brain perceives it
Wavelength may be objective, but the signal that a brain receives may be different if the cells which are supposed to receive that objective wavelength aren't functioning correctly.
Like if I make you wear rose coloured glasses, it doesn't matter what colours I show you, you won't be able to name them correctly because the objective stimulus is literally coloured before it makes it to your brain.
Except the rose-colored glasses example doesn't really disagree, because the colored glass is absorbing all the photons except the pink ones, so you're really just further making my point.
But that's correlation, the way the brain conceptualizes it into a "color" in the mental model, well that's the qualia stuff referenced in another comment.
That's what I've been doing. It might not be ideal but it works more times than it doesn't.
...here's one for ya, purple doesn't appear in any specturm or in nature, it a a complete creation of man mixing blue and red together...
There are purple flowers? How is that not in nature.
That's kinda up for debate. Most people casually consider violet to be purple, and the distinction of it being a non-spectral color is a (fairly contentious) academic one.
Now pink, on the other hand, that's an unholy creation not of earth....
Violet's wavelength is singular, and near the edge of the visible spectrum while purple has 2 peaks and is in the middle, as mix of red and blue (as stated). Think harmonics but with light.
They are very much different colors. The shade/hue/etc. are all different values. 4F2F4F vs 800080.
And yet if you tell someone to go get the purple flower over there, they will not be at all confused and know exactly what you're talking g about. They may be technically different colours, but practically they are interchangeable.
I get that, during casual conversation etc. But what if there's a bunch of violet and purple flowers and they pick a violet one? The distinction can matter and knowing it can be useful. You can't use other people's ignorance as an excuse.
Even crayon companies make both for a reason JS :P
But what if there's a bunch of violet and purple flowers
If you only provide the color, regardless which one, there would be a high risk of them choosing the wrong because they are so visually similar. so you would of course provide further physical description that would help distinguish the correct flower.
pink dolphins? Salmon? pink flowers?
This is a comment on the fascinatingly complex semantic argument surrounding non-spectral colors, not that "pink things" themselves don't exist.
forgive me i still need coffee
I'll spare you, but only if you share some coffee. Someone appears to have snuck in and drank all of mine...
...and that's why carnatians are the flower of death...heehehehehh.../s
Purple flowers definitely exist though?
Not being spectral means it's not a single colour, it's always a mix of colours
So lots of colours are a mix of colours. That is kind of the point.
Yes, but also a bit of no. Some mixes produce the colour that is exactly the same as you would produce bulky a single colour. Statistically I would guess that most don't, but I am not sure and failed to find such a statistics on the internet
Orange doesn't exist.
some do, and some don't! this is definitely a thing that happens, finding out your color blind as an adult. most often when people try to so things like get pilots licenses etc
yes, they do find out when they are young. in many countries they get tested even. most just can't see the difference of two colors, eg red and green. usually traffic lights are in a certain order, so it works for them.
we will never know if red looks green to them or green looks red to them. they still can see it's not grey.