A Canadian woman has created a new contact lens prototype to enable people with colour blindness to see a full spectrum of colour.

Colorsmith Labs CEO Gabrielle Masone, in partnership with scientists at Saint Mary's University in Canada, has developed contact lenses with a special light-filtering coating and nanoparticle technology.
“Not everyone wants to walk around in tinted glasses, you know?” she told CTV Atlantic. “We all love Bono [U2’s lead singer] but no one wants to look like him every day.”

Masone ultimately wants her lenses to help people with vision problems such as deuteranopia, a commonly inherited form of red-green colourblindness.

Her prototype hasn’t been tested with people yet, but her Halifax-based company and Professor Danielle Tokarz from St Mary’s hopes it soon will be. “We've made the functional nanoparticles which is super exciting. We're just optimising them, and we are in the testing phase of actually starting to put them in contact lenses,” said Prof Tokarz.

28-year-old Masone’s own difficulty seeing colour hues after suffering amblyopia inspired her career in vision care. “When I was little, I had an eye condition called amblyopia that made me lose vision in one of my eyes.”