A 22-year-old guitarist has seen color for the very first time in his life, and the emotional moment when he is stunned as he realizes he can now identify the shades of the rainbow was caught on video.
Westen Weiss, from Los Angeles, is color blind, and his indie rock band, The Wrecks, bought him some special glasses with color correcting lenses as a surprise so he could experience the bright lights of being on stage.
The heartwarming footage shows Westen’s look of shock as he is handed the goggles by lead singer Nick Anderson, 22, and his pals appear with an array of balloons in colors he couldn’t properly see before – red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
Seeing like never before: An emotional video shows the moment 22-year-old Westen Weiss who is color blind, was surprised by his bandmates with color-correcting glasses
Grateful: Lead singer Nick Anderson, 22, handed Westen the glasses. He said the band wanted the guitarist to experience the bright lights of being on stage
When he puts on the glasses he exclaims: ‘It’s so much more vivid! The table is, like, so different.’
The grinning rocker then correctly identifies the color of each balloon before being overcome with emotion and hugging his friends. The footage, posted on the band’s Facebook page, has racked up more than 16,000 views.
‘I had no idea what to expect but it was amazing when I first put them on,’ said Westen, who’s originally from New York. ‘It was a little overwhelming. Everything was so much more vibrant.’
Colorful! Westen’s pals appear on the video with an array of balloons in colors he couldn’t properly see before – red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple
Viral: The video, posted on the band’s Facebook page, has racked up more than 16,000 views
He added that the glasses gave him the ability to see what ‘normal’ people see for the first time; Without them, Westen said, having his vision is ‘usually like living with the saturation down’.
The band are touring this fall and Westen, who currently wears the glasses for driving and sporadically to enjoy the vivid colors, plans to don them on stage.
Band member Nick said he was nervous that the glasses wouldn’t do anything for Westen, but was delighted to see his friend’s reaction after he tried them.
‘It was heartwarming for us to be a part of it,’ he said before sharing what inspired the band to buy the glasses.
The Wrecks: The band (pictured) are touring this fall and Westen, who currently wears the glasses for driving and sporadically to enjoy the vivid colors, plans to don them on stage
Grateful: Westen said the glasses are ‘the cutest gift’ he’s ever gotten: ‘It genuinely gave me an opportunity to see something I never would have seen otherwise’
‘It blows our minds, especially when we are playing concerts every night and the colors look amazing and everything is crazy,’ Nick said. ‘He can’t experience that.’
And Westen definitely appreciated the gift from his band, calling it ‘the cutest gift’ he’s ever been given.
‘It genuinely gave me an opportunity to see something I never would have seen otherwise,’ he said.
Useful shades: One in 12 men and one in 200 women are believed to be colorblind – around 300 million people worldwide
A good deed: ‘It blows our minds, especially when we are playing concerts every night and the colors look amazing and everything is crazy,’ Nick said of Westen. ‘He can’t experience that’
One in 12 men and one in 200 women are believed to be colorblind – around 300 million people worldwide.
Enchroma glasses don’t fix color blindness but enhance the vibrancy and saturation of certain colors and work for four out of five red-green colorblind people. They contain special optical filters that remove small slices of light to give users a more accurate ratio of light entering the photopigments in the eye.
Famous colorblind people include Bill Clinton, Prince William, Rod Stewart, Eddie Redmayne, Nicolas Cage and Meatloaf.