A sweet viral video is making the rounds this week that just might leave you in a puddle of tears.
In it, a grandfather is gifted a small cardboard box on his 66th birthday, and giddily urged by his family to open it up. Inside, he finds a pair of sunglasses — but these aren’t just any sunglasses. They’re a pair of EcChroma glasses, designed specifically for the colorblind.
“Color for the colorblind … ” the grandpa says aloud, while reading the box. “I am colorblind, ” he responds with a laugh, as his family erupts into chuckles around him.
“Dad, these are special glasses,” his son then explains off-camera. “[They] have been engineered … so that when people wear them who are colorblind, you get to see color just like we get to see color.”
“No kidding,” replies the stunned grandpa, before opening up the package and placing the glasses on his face.
And that’s when the emotional level of this video gets cranked way up.
“It’s so clear I can’t believe it,” he says through tears, looking all around him as he sees color for the first time. “Golly … ”
Later in the video, we see him marveling at an animated cartoon on TV, and overcome by the beauty of a sunset.
The video was originally shared on YouTube by Carson Stafford back in December 2016, but is just now going viral — and sending the Internet into all sorts of emotions.
“It’s 6 AM, I just woke up and saw this video … now I’m crying …” wrote one YouTube user.
“This is my favorite video so far. His reaction is priceless. Plus, he is such a genuine person,” wrote another.
The ability to see color is one of those things many of us take for granted; much like the ability to hear, touch, and even smell. But according to the National Eye Institute, colorblindness affects a small, yet sizable portion of the world.
“As many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women with Northern European ancestry have the common form of red-green color blindness,” reports NEI. “Men are much more likely to be colorblind than women because the genes responsible for the most common, inherited color blindness are on the X chromosome.”
Perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that inherited color blindness can be present at birth, start in early childhood, or not even appear at all until a person’s reached their adult years.
But now, thanks to the wonders of technology, people with colorblindness won’t have to live the rest of their lives without seeing color at all. Glasses like the one this grandpa got from EnChroma have specialized lenses that act as optic filters, filtering out certain colors that may be interfering with how a colorblind person perceives colors.
How amazing is that?