Hacker News Reader

Comment by burkemw3 | Hacker News Reader

You can wear glasses that filter blue light.

The article mentions wearing them outside, but they work inside as well.

I wear them, and they provide other benefits for me as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529054#16531413)

So I used to have glasses with a blue blocker filter on them - I absolutely hated every second of wearing them. Literally everything appeared yellow through them - my screens, sheets of paper, even snow looked like it had been peed on - awful. I mean, it's certainly not surprising - they did block blue light after all. But I wore them for 3 months and then marched back to the optician to have them replaced with normal lenses. And the optician has promised that the effect would be very subtle and hardly noticeable in daily use - well, maybe I'm particularly sensitive to it, but the effect was very noticeable to me.

My new eyeglasses have a coating that reflect blue light. They absolutely do NOT shift the color spectrum. You can't tell the coating is there. Perhaps it's newer or different tech. Look into it.

I just don't understand how that could possibly work - it doesn't matter if the glasses absorb or reflect blue light - as long as it doesn't reach your eyes, anything that is normally white will look yellow, as you're not seeing the blue component. You can't filter/reflect blue light and still see it.

Colour perception is not that simple. The visual cortex compensates. It's the same sort of compensation that means that you see the same colours for objects under artificial lighting and in sunlight, even though spectral analysis will show them not to be.

Yup. I don't know how else to explain it. Trust me, I'm very sensitive to color temperature changes. I have 4 pair of eyeglasses I rotate through every day. Only 2 of them have the latest anti-blue coating. You simply cannot see it. I don't know what product it is, but a good example description from Zeiss:

https://www.zeiss.com/vision-care/en_us/products/coating-col...

Are you talking about the coating opticians are pushing for "computer glasses" now in the US?

I have that, and while it is subtle, I definitely can tell it is there. It doesn't ruin general color perception, unlike many obviously yellow/brown lenses. But, it definitely alters the world to have a slight yellow tinge, a bit like you can get from the haze caused by a distant dust storm or wild fire.

It doesn't bother me, but I am aware of it. I actually prefer brown sunglasses and photochromatics because what is marketed as "gray" often looks sickly purple to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com