Julie Sorge, Amherst, Virginia, graduate student, didn’t realize she was color blind until she was 15 years old. When she kept handing the wrong color of pastel crayons to her friend in art class, he teased her.

“What are you, color blind?” he asked. She thought about it, and realized it explained a lot.

For Sorge and many like her, trees and flowers blend together into a gray mass and Mountain Dew just looks a “nice bright gray” instead of a vivid yellow.

Being color blind can lead to embarrassment, ridicule or even danger, but it isn’t exactly like seeing the world in a black-and-white photo. Color blindness is usually just a mixing up of colors, most commonly greens and reds, says Kevin Trummel, a Lawrence optometrist.

Finding out you’re color blind later in life, like Sorge, isn’t a rare occurrence. Erin Beaton, Madison senior, thought what she saw was normal until she was about 6 years old. It wasn’t until she started learning her colors at school that she realized she couldn’t see things the same way other children could.

“In second grade, I was doing a coloring assignment, and the teacher yelled at me because she thought I was obnoxious for coloring with the wrong colors,” Beaton says. “She didn’t realize that I couldn’t tell what the colors were.”

Color blindness often restricts people from certain jobs, like fighter pilot or electrician, Trummel says. Color blindness affects the little things in life. Trying to see if a tornado is about to hit Kansas can be difficult if each region on The Weather Channel looks gray. Picking out fresh produce is a tough task if you can’t distinguish whether a banana is green or yellow. Reading a map can be confusing, because many maps have colored legends. It makes finding the right shade of lipstick at the Clinique counter challenging.

Sorge says the hardest thing for her is when she pulls up to a stoplight at night. When it’s too dark to tell if the top or bottom signal is lit up, she tries to judge from the traffic around her.

Although Beaton relies on help from her roommates to pick her outfits in the morning, simple adaptations and lots of memorization make it possible for her to live in such a colorful world. When she first moves into a new apartment, her mom arranges the clothes in her closet according to color, and Beaton memorizes the order. When someone tells Beaton something is a certain color, she tries to memorize that shade of gray, so when she sees it again she can try to distinguish what color it is.

While Beaton sees shades of gray, black and white, her father can see only black and white, and her sister sees black, white and red.

Color blindness can simply be the inability to distinguish one color from another. There are three chemicals in the back of the eye — one each for red, green and blue — and if one of those chemicals is deficient, it can cause color blindness, Trummel says.

Color blindness is an X-linked recessive gene most commonly expressed in males. Seven percent of American males are color blind and 20 times more men are color blind than women, a report from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute says.

Sorge’s father is also color blind. She says she remembers the days when her father would dress her in the mornings and her mother would be horrified at some of the mismatched ensembles.

Because color blindness is genetic, laser eye surgery is probably not a possible remedy, Trummel says. Someone who can’t see certain colors can wear special-colored lenses that shift the light and make it possible to see some colors, he says.

But Beaton wouldn’t change a thing.

“It’s really my own perspective of my own little world. It’s kind of a neat feeling knowing that no one else can see what you’re seeing,” she says. “I love going shopping and picking outfits for people as gifts and having them not match. Then they always know it’s from me.”