Color Blindness Facts
By The Detect Color Blindness editorial team
Last reviewed
A quick, myth-busting tour of colour vision deficiency, what it actually is, how it works and what it's like to live with.
The basics
- It's rarely "blindness". Most colour-blind people see colour, just a narrower range. Seeing only in greys is extremely rare.
- It's common. About 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are affected.
- It's mostly inherited and lifelong. Inherited colour blindness is stable, it doesn't get worse. Colour vision that changes over time can point to an acquired cause.
- Red-green is by far the most common type; blue-yellow and total colour blindness are rare.
Common myths
- Myth: colour-blind people can't drive. They can, traffic lights are read by position and brightness as well as colour, and colour blindness alone rarely disqualifies drivers.
- Myth: it only affects men. It's rarer in women but real, see can women be colour blind?
- Myth: glasses cure it. Colour-blind glasses can boost contrast for some people but don't restore missing cones.
- Myth: everyone sees the same "wrong" colours. The experience varies by type and severity.
Living with colour blindness
Day to day, the friction is usually small but real: judging ripe fruit, reading colour-coded charts and maps, matching clothes, or spotting a red pen mark on a page. Many people develop workarounds, memorising the order of traffic lights, using labels, or apps that name colours. In some careers (aviation, rail, maritime, parts of the military and electrical trades) colour vision standards apply; see the lantern test.
The upside and the curious bits
- Some colour-blind people are better at seeing through certain camouflage, because they rely less on colour and more on texture and brightness.
- Colour blindness was first described scientifically by chemist John Dalton in 1798, which is why it's sometimes called "Daltonism".
- Screening plates like the Ishihara test have been used for over a century.
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