John Trask is 76 years old and is Dealing with color-blindness is whole life. He says,

“I’ve never seen a sunset or a rainbow.”

Is it really possible that somebody can’t see a sunset or a rainbow because of his color blindness? – I can’t believe it.

With not seeing a sunset he can only mean not to see the beautiful colorized sky and sun during a sunset. Seeing the sun going down behind the horizon can’t be a problem even for a colorblind person. And to my eyes also some beautiful colors can be perceived.

I’m red-blind, or at least strongly red-weak. And a sunset can be something really beautiful even to me. Of course, it will never be as colorful as for a person with normal color vision. But isn’t everything just less colorful for us colorblind guys?

And it’s the same for a rainbow. I can definitely see a rainbow—just less colorful.

A rainbow consists of the whole color spectrum and this with a blue sky or gray/white clouds in the background. So if you can’t see a rainbow, you must not be able to distinguish all colors either against blue or gray. And this could only be the case, if you suffer from a complete color blindness.

I don’t believe, that somebody with red-green color blindness can’t see a sunset or a rainbow. You can see them, but just less colorful as everything else on the world.

But what I agree on is another of John’s statements.

“Stop signs disappear,” Trask said. “The white lettering I can pick out, but [the rest of the sign] just fades into whatever is in the background.”

What are your experiences with sunsets, rainbows and stop signs?

Pictures by vtveen, Mundoo and overundulate.