As many who have seen EnChroma’s marketing videos will know, EnChroma is an eyeglass company that claims their product can correct an issue that many people across the world have: color blindness. However, these claims are patently false.

As someone who learned that they were colorblind from a very young age, it’s an enticing offer. According to EnChroma’s website, about 350 million people around the world are some form of colorblind. To some, that is a shocking statistic.

However, the percentages put it into perspective. According to a community page on color blindness, that 350 million equates to around 5% of the world population. As someone who lives with color blindness, a majority of it does not inhibit my life. 

As written by the National Eye Institute, under association with the National Institute of Health Sciences, there are three categories by which colorblindness is categorized: red-green deficiency, blue-yellow deficiency and complete color deficiency. Within these categories are different types of color blindness dependent on the specific behavior of the cones and rod filaments in one’s eye. 

For simplicity and brevity, I will only be discussing my form of color deficiency. Considered the most common form of color blindness, red-green deficiency comes in various forms such as deuteranomaly, protanomaly and protanopia/deuteranopia. Deuteranomaly and protanomaly are the two most common types of red-green colorblindness. 

Consisting of deficient or overlapping cones in your eye, it is a genetic anomaly that changes how your brain registers color visually. With deuteranomaly and protanomaly, red and green are still visible. The colors are more muted, making individual shades of red or green harder to tell apart. Protanopia is more severe, where both red and green are impossible to tell apart. 

Knowing that, it should start to sound hard to believe that a pair of glasses can fix a genetic variable. To be fair, glasses can do some pretty amazing things. Correcting bad vision and helping to reduce eye strain are what a lot of people need glasses for. 

For me, it affects my ability to see complex shades of color but it does not hinder my ability to operate in society. For example, I can see the red stop sign and tell the difference between a red and green light. 

To my surprise, I found that my ability to distinguish between different colors had increased once I put the glasses on. However, the colors were still washed out by the red hue of the lens. I also found that I would develop eye strain from wearing the glasses for too long. This is where my song of skepticism grew into a chorus of concern.

According to “Color vision devices for color vision deficiency patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” a research article provided by an issue of “Health Sciences Reports,” there is no clinical proof that EnChroma glasses, Chromagen filters or other Color-Vision Deficiency products have the advertised effect of “restoring color vision.”

The researchers did conclude that the glasses had an effect on color identification accuracy, which is not the advertised effect of the glasses. It is easy to confuse color accuracy with full color vision. 

For the first example, I cannot tell apart the different shades of red in the bricks that make up a large wall. Does that hinder my life in any way? No. With the EnChroma glasses, I can see the different shades of red through the red-tinted lenses. 

Now, the second example is an art gallery. I can perceive the artistic quality of a painting. Perhaps, I am missing a few shades of red or green. When I wear the EnChroma glasses I can now more accurately differentiate the shades, but at the cost of the original color of the art as it gets washed out by the red-tint.

So, in my opinion, what is advertised and what you buy are two different things when it comes to EnChroma glasses.

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