September 20 - What Colour Is This?

The seasons are changing and I am gradually changing my wardrobe to go along with the cooler temperatures. I don’t have much trouble with this in the spring when I switch to neutral toned shorts and multi coloured tops, but the winter pants are a different story. Black, brown, navy, dark grey or dark green  – they all look the same to me. I am often asking Lyle, “What colour is this?”

In the early days of my vision loss, I remember once when a friend asked if I could still see colours. I responded with great confidence that yes, I could. “For instance,” I said.” I can see that you are wearing a green sweater.”

There was a moment of silence until my friend corrected me by saying that her sweater was actually blue.

I like bright primary colours and I wear them whenever I can. Now if I could just talk Lyle into wearing some of those same colours perhaps I might be able to pick him out in a crowd!

I have known some people who have been colour blind. Not being able to distinguish between red and green is a challenge, but once I met a woman whose world was seen only in black, grey and white. Connie told me that she thought she might be able to see some shades of yellow.  When friends told her that something was yellow, she thought that she could discern some difference from her black and white world.  Now that is truly colour blindness.

There is a battery operated device on the market that will read colour aloud. I experimented with this once but thought it was unreliable for the different shades of colours and obviously didn’t work on multi coloured stripes and patterns. This was a few years ago and likely there have been some improvements in the technology. I do have a couple of friends who use the device and as they have no sight, it is certainly better than braille or other tactile labelling on clothes.

So, what is the solution? For me the key is organization. I hang my clothes in colour sections. While sighted people might hang pants in one section, tops in another and so on, I hang all the blue clothes together, all the brown in another part, etc. In my drawer I have two rows of socks. I can tell the difference between black and white and those are the only two colours I buy.  While mismatched socks are one thing, mismatched shoes could be more obvious to someone with sight. Once I spent a whole day wearing a blue shoe on one foot and a black on the other. They were the same style but apparently very different colours. I was saved embarrassment during the day as Lyle didn’t tell me of my mistake until we were home in the evening.

People who are blind or partially sighted need to make all sorts of adjustments to living in a world geared to sight. Fortunately as the fashion world evolves, our choices of colour no longer stand out as mistakes, but rather as individual fashion statements. What colour is this? The answer matters only to the individual.