For Bill Goerich, the world once was a gray and colorless place. From birth until four years ago, the 27-year-old Naperville resident suffered from red-green color deficiency, known as colorblindness. Now, however, he wears a single hand-tinted soft contact lens on his right eye and says he sees everything in color.
“I can really see a sunset now, or a rainbow, a color movie or art,” Goerich said. “It’s stunning.” Even an apple, he said, glows red.
Though there is no cure for colorblindness, tinted contact lenses can help some victims of colorblindness cope enough to distinguish colors. Goerich is a believer.
“I was first diagnosed as [being] colorblind when I was about 5 years old,” explained Goerich, a water-quality analyst with the City of Naperville. “I played a game called Candyland. We had to spin a spinner that lands on a certain color and then move our piece across a board to the same color. When I played that game, I could never figure out what to do.”
Goerich’s parents took him to an ophthalmologist for a standard colorblindness test in which numbers or letters composed of colored dots are embedded in larger fields of different colored dots.
Inherited problem
Colorblindness usually is inherited, explained Michael Cassano, a Naperville optometrist who has been treating Goerich for eye and vision problems for about seven years. It may also be caused by disease or injury. In Goerich’s case, his mother’s father also had the red-green deficiency.
Goerich endured his problem for almost another 20 years after it was diagnosed. One of the first survival techniques he learned was how to distinguish between red and green traffic lights. “I knew that the red light was on top, the green on the bottom,” he said. “But to me, the lights looked the same.”
Selecting harmonious attire was another problem for Goerich, who is single. “Sometimes I’d wear clothing with garishly clashing colors,” he said with a laugh. “So when I went shopping for clothes, I brought someone with me for help. They helped me select a `can’t-miss’ wardrobe, everything matching, so I wouldn’t have that problem. I also wore jeans a lot, because everything goes with denim.”
Four years ago, he applied for a job with Naperville as a water-quality analyst. Goerich, with a bachelor’s degree from Ball State University in fisheries management, knew that his colorblindness could prevent him from landing the job.
Among the work of a water-quality analyst, Goerich explained, is adding chemical agents to water to determine bacteria levels and other constituents of the liquid. Depending on content, the water changes to various colors. He was able to handle that at college, but it might be a handicap on the job.
So Goerich sought Cassano’s help.
“I retested Mr. Goerich for color-deficiency and sent a soft contact lens he had been wearing for near-sightedness and astigmatism to a firm called Adventures in Color Technology in Golden, Colo., for hand-tinting,” Cassano said. “I’d had a previous success with a color-deficient patient using a hand-tinted soft contact lens from them.”
His new painted magenta lens worked, Goerich said, and he landed the job he had sought. “It’s just a simple contact lens with a translucent red [actually magenta] dot in the center covering the iris. My normal eye color is hazel, but in certain light when I’m wearing my lens, my right eye appears red.”
“About 1 in 20 males has the red-green color deficiency,” Cassano said. “It’s the most prevalent form of color-deficiency. In females it only occurs in about 1 in 200. The lens is placed on the non-dominant eye and creates what we call retinal rivalry. That means two [different] images are coming into the brain simultaneously, and the images are so different that the brain can now distinguish color.”
People see with both eyes, but one eye is dominant, Cassano explained.
“If you’re right-handed, your right eye is usually dominant.” In Goerich’s case, because he’s left-handed, he wears his lens on his non-dominant right eye.
New York optician Cary Hirschfield explained that the colored lens works like a colored camera filter, which accentuates certain colors. But he added that wearing the red lens may impart a reddish cast to other objects. With time, he said, the brain compensates and colors appear normal.
Several firms hand-tint contact lenses to correct for colorblindness. Costs may range from $200 to $600, excluding professional services.
“Our hand-painted lenses were introduced in 1994,” said Stanley Harper, a former president of the Contact Lens Society of America who founded Adventures in Color Technology in 1988 with wife Elizabeth, also an optician. “We now have about 10,000 clients–opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists–who regularly use our services.”
Pioneering technology
The process of hand-applying chromatically precise color dyes to a soft contact lens to correct for colorblindness was developed by Harper with California optometrist Jay Schlanger, according to Harper. Schlanger also pioneered color technology for hard contacts in the 1970s.
“We’re hand-tinting a material that’s 55 percent water,” said Harper, describing the hydroxy ethyl methacrylate and polymer base that constitutes the soft contact lenses sent to ACT for processing.
Two staff artists, sometimes using brushes with a single hair, apply the FDA-approved dyes to the lenses. Once the dye is applied, it’s fixed by the application of an additional chemical. Completing a lens requires about two hours of total work time over three days.
The long period is necessary because a lens may be worked on for only seven or eight minutes, then must be rehydrated and allowed to relax or set.
For Goerich, his single hand-tinted ACT lens has opened a new world of color. “That first day when I looked at myself in the mirror, I was stunned to see how alive I looked,” he said. “Before I had my lens, everyone’s face looked pasty gray, including mine.”
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Jobs that depend on seeing colors
Full-color vision is essential in many professions and occupations. Among the jobs in which uncorrected colorblindness may be a serious handicap is cinematography. Various colored filters are required to shoot color film, California optometrist Jay Schlanger said.
Many of his patients have been in the motion picture industry. Being unable to distinguish a red filter from a green filter could be disastrous.
Other color-critical professions include law enforcement, firefighting–firefighters must be able to distinguish different colored flames–mapmaking, printing, painting, interior design, computer technician and electricians, who daily confront tangled wires in a rainbow of colors.
