A colorblind man explains what it was like seeing the color of his kids' eyes for the first time.
"It was like finally seeing a painting finished that you had looked at for 30 years unfinished."
Thanks to a special pair of glasses, a man who has been colorblind his whole life was finally able to see colors the way the rest of the world does.
The video is absolutely heartwarming. The man is visibly overwhelmed by the experience and is struck when he looks into the eyes of his children, seeing their eyes in a vivid new way for the very first time.
The man's name is Opie Hughes, and he has a form of color vision deficiency (more commonly referred to as colorblindness).
One common misconception about color deficiency is that people with it see the world in black and white. That's not the case.
More often, it's that certain colors become somewhat indistinguishable from certain other colors, blending together.
For some quick examples of what the world might look like for someone with color deficiency, I ran a photo through the Color Oracle colorblindness simulator.
With this photo of my trusty assistant/dog Meatball, we can see what three different forms of color deficiency might look like:
On the left is the original picture. The three other pictures are different forms of color deficiency (yes, the middle two are slightly different).
I had a chance to chat with Opie Hughes about what those first few moments with the glasses were like.
"The whole experience as seen in the video is more the culmination of everything going on between the excitement, the environment, the nervousness, and the actual effect of the glasses," he tells me. "The actual effect was still pretty amazing, and the best part is they only get better as your eyes adjust."
GIF by Katherine Empey.
Hughes walked me through his experience with color deficiency, describing it as a world of "duller, blended colors."
For him, colors split into three separate groups that blend together, as shown here on this image I put together. Blues were hard to differentiate from purples, pink could be difficult to tell apart from white, and so on.
"Those three major groups are kind of just blended together," he tells me. "So, it's not as if I'd never seen my babies' blue eyes before, but when all the other colors around those eyes just meshed together into a detail-less mash of color, it was very unnoticeable that their eyes were so vibrant. ... It was like finally seeing a painting finished that you had looked at for 30 years unfinished."
A California company called EnChroma makes the glasses.
The manufacturing process is a little tough to grasp for those of us (like me) who aren't optometrists. But basically, it comes down to a series of high-tech filters. They do note, however: "We don't claim that this is a cure for color blindness — it is not a cure. Like any eyeglass product, it is an optical assistive device."
As for Hughes, he tells me that he wears his glasses as often as he can and considers them a sort of "fourth child."
"The glasses are my fourth child, really," he says. "Kept clean and protected and by my side at all times possible. I would be heartbroken if anything ever happened to them."
"I have yet to put them on and not find myself shaking my head in disbelief at something I had walked past, or seen for so many years unnoticed that now pops," he excitedly tells me.
"The tree in my yard has pink flowers. I always thought they were white! I've seen shades of purple I always thought were just black! The colors in the sunset are ridiculous! That was usually just blue and orange, now it's blue purple red orange yellow, so much more to everything!"
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
At least it wasn't Bubbles. 
You just know there's a person named Whiskey out there getting a kick out of this. 
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.