How well do you see color? Source: Shutterstock.com

Sometimes in the middle of the work or school day, your mind starts wandering. This becomes more of an issue when your job revolves around the Internet. That’s how I found myself spending about twenty minutes taking the Online Color Challenge from X-Rite.

The gist is pretty straightforward. There’s a row of colors and the two on the ends are set for each row. You move around the color squares in the middle into the proper order. This test is based on the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test, where you do a similar color ordering, but with actual little “color caps” in a kit that you physically put in order.

Well, the idea may be pretty simple, but that certainly didn’t mean I thought it was easy. When you hear the directions it’s like, “Oh yeah, sort colors? Totes can do that!” Then I started and was freaking out about where to put the little squares. I’d second guess myself. I’d look away from the computer screen, and my eyesight had started to go a little nutty. I will say though by the time I went to hit submit, I felt pretty good about my answers.

I’m sure you’re dying to know how I did! Well, I got an 18, and at first, I had no idea what that meant. After I put in my gender and age info, it showed me a little scale that went from 0 to 99. Apparently the best score I could get was zero (a wizard of color acuity!) and the 99 meant the lowest color acuity.

So I guess looking at it on the scale, my color acuity is close-ish to being good? I tried to do some research, but I had kind of a hard time finding out the average score for my age, so right now, I guess I’m a little at a stand still.

According to the test site, there’s apparently quite a big difference between color vision issues when it comes to men vs. women. For women, 1 out of every 255 have some sort of issue with seeing color, but for men, it’s 1 in every 12. I already have pretty blurry vision (full-time glasses wearer over here!), so should I be concerned about how I can discern color now too? Right now, I think I’m doing all right, but it was still pretty interesting to test it out.

Still, I thought this was a pretty cool challenge and it ended up being harder than I thought it would be! I know this online one is based on this other test that has been the subject of studies and used by health professionals, but I’m guessing there could be some variation between doing the actual test versus online.

So that said, if you are really concerned about how your eyes see color or just your eyesight in general, talking with a doctor is probably your most official bet. However, if you’re just looking for a little bit of of a distraction, you may want to see how you fare at the color challenge yourself!

Did you take the color challenge? How did it go for you? Did you have better luck than me finding something online about average scores for your age? Have you ever had issues with how you see color? Tell me in the comments!

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