A colorblind man was moved to tears when he tried on a pair of special glasses that allowed him to see sunset in its full glory for the first time.
Aaron Williams-Mele posted the video over the weekend to YouTube, saying his parents got him a pair of special EnChroma glasses and he would be trying them on for the first time at Whitehurst Beach in Norfolk, Virginia.
Williams-Mele puts the glasses on and is immediately taken aback by what he sees.
"What the f*ck," he says, then chokes up and is moved to tears.
The glasses were invented on accident by scientist Don McPherson in 2005 who was creating special lenses to protect surgeons' eyes and help them differentiate color during procedures, Smithsonian reports. They were found to have a different use when McPherson's friend, who is colorblind, asked to borrow them.
Suddenly, his friend could see colors he had not been able to see. So McPherson and his team began making design improvements geared toward helping the colorblind see color.
All people have three sets of "cones" in their eyes allowing them to see three colors: blue, red and green, according to Smithsonian. In colorblind people, the red and green cones overlap too much, which causes loss of perception. The glasses work by forcing the cones to absorb color like a normal eye.
Watch Williams-Mele react to seeing the sunset for the first time with normal color vision here:
