Color Blindness Cure & Correction

If you came here looking for a color blindness cure, I’m very sorry to say that there is none. Color blindness isn’t curable, since it’s caused by an inherited defect of the light sensitive pigment in special cells – called cone cells in the retina at the back of the eye.  There is no method of eye surgery yet available in medical science that can repair or add fully functional cones to your eyes, but we can all live in hope that one day some form of gene therapy will make a cure possible. For now, fortunately some companies are working hard to optimise tinted lens combinations to aid color blind people to improve their color perception.

Corrective Lenses: A Color Blindness Cure?

There are currently 4 main companies developing products to aid color blind people in reducing the effects of their condition: ColorMax, ColorView, ChomaGen, and ColorLite. All 4 companies base their efforts around utilising tinted lenses to alter the light entering the eye.

The way this works is actually quite simple. You use a lens in one or both of your eyes, the lens can either be a contact lens or in glasses frames. Because one eye has a modified quality of light, the brain can use the difference in the feedback it receives from each eye to identify more information about the colors present than it would normally. You can also use tinted lenses for both eyes, but the tints must be different colors to maintain difference in what each eye is seeing.

ChromaGen report that over 97% of patients in their study reported significant improvement in their color vision. However it should be noted that initially many patients are unsure whether they are happy with the change as the tinted lenses do change the way a patient is accustomed to seeing the world. The manufacturers of these lenses generally promise the following improvements:

• Improve general color perception
• Make colors brighter and clearer
• Allow shades of color, previously unseen, to be observed
• Improve the ability to name colors correctly (especially when assistance is provided in this area e.g. by relatives or friends)

Ultimately, all of the companies providing corrective lenses for color blindness are aiming to improve color perception in the real world, however many critics believe the lenses are only providing a dramatic increase in the success rate when taking the Ishihara Test. This critical analysis is somewhat fuelled by the fact that tinted lenses appear not to offer any benefit to patients undertaking a color arrangement test or any other types of test for that matter.