On a grey and cloudy Friday, one man is seeing colour clearly for the first time in his life.
Barrie resident Rick Krause was surprised by his wife Samantha and their two children with new glasses to help him see the vibrant colours around him.
Rick has been colour blind his whole life and once he put the glasses on, he remarked, “Wow, this is crazy.”
The 31-year-old later joked his wife has been great at helping him pick out his wardrobe from time to time.
“It's a bit of a game changer,” he said. “I’ve gotten used to guessing certain things or being able to assume what colours go together and what colours match, so (Samantha) is always been helpful with helping me pick out my outfits.
"So I don’t know how I did today, but now maybe I can see if I’m matching now.”
Samantha entered a contest earlier this year after seeing an ad on Facebook and was notified a couple weeks ago that she’d won.
She was able to keep it a secret until Friday when she, Rick and their two daughters met at Kozlov Park with friends and family.
“This was a bit of a reveal as an early Father’s Day present,” Samantha said. “It's nice that he can now enjoy all the colours the same as we do.”
EnChroma glasses use special optical filters that help the colour blind see an expanded range of colour and to see it clearly, vibrantly and distinctly. The glasses are the product of two research grants and clinical trials at University of California Berkeley and University of California Davis.
EnChroma says one in 12 men (eight per cent) and one in 200 women (less than one per cent) are colour blind, with approximately 1.6 million people in Canada and 350 million worldwide affected.
While people with normal colour vision see over one million hues and shades, people who are colour blind only see about 10 per cent of colours.
To Rick, the world appears grey and dull with some colours being indistinguishable. A bag of different-coloured balloons were brought to the occasion and he was able to identify each colour once he had the glasses on.
“Primary colours are pretty vibrant and you can tell them apart between each other. But when you have a lot of colours overlapping each other or that are close to each other, that's where it becomes difficult,” he said. “If there was a red flower in a green field, it would be hard for me to pick out the red.”
Rick said that not only will work be easier for deciphering multi-coloured graphs, but he now has the upper hand on his sibling.
“My brother is also colour blind — that's kind of how it works in the family — so he's going to be jealous,” he said.
