Introduction to How Colorblindness Works Roses are red, violets
are blue -- well, bluish. The sky is blue, too. Grass is green.
These are things that most of us know for a fact and don't
question. But what if you were colorblind? What would you see?
Is life one long black-and-white movie? In "The Wizard of Oz,"
Dorothy Gale steps out of her black-and-white Kansas farmhouse
and into the color-saturated Land of Oz. She moves from a
humdrum existence of chores and troubles to an intense
fantasyland peopled with curious creatures, trading in a
clapboard house for yellow brick roads, red ruby slippers and a
brilliant green city of emeralds. What would her transformation
have been without this rainbow of colors? Color isn't just a
component of vision. We associate color with beauty, like in a
gorgeous sunset. Some colors have meaning in and of themselves
-- purple is for royals, red signifies passion. Colors seep into
our expressions -- If we're depressed, we say we're feeling
blue. We're also "green with envy," we