Yes. Color vision matures in infancy, shifts subtly with age, and can change with eye disease, injury, or certain medicines. In healthy aging, the lens yellows and telling similar shades apart gets harder, yet colors often look stable because the brain compensates. A sudden change, or a change in one eye only, is different and deserves an eye exam.
Color Vision Starts Out Immature
Newborns do not see color well. A review of infant color perception reports that neonates need highly saturated, relatively large colored stimuli to detect color. The red-green mechanism appears to develop first, the blue-yellow mechanism follows about 4 to 8 weeks later, and infants are trichromatic by about 3 months. The review focuses mainly on the first 6 months after birth, and suggests that how infants represent hue around 3 months could reflect a shift in visual cortex organization.
Healthy Aging Yellows the Lens
A study in PLOS ONE notes that lens yellowing selectively reduces short-wavelength light, and that sensitivity losses occur in the cone receptor mechanisms. We explain the lens side in the lens yellowing process, and the retinal side in how rod and cone function changes over time.
Scientists have debated how to describe this. A Verriest Lecture review notes that short-wavelength-sensitive cones appear to be affected earliest and most severely in many acquired color deficiencies. Yet it questions the widely held view that aging is simply an acquired deficiency from selective loss of those cones.
Shades Get Harder to Tell Apart
The same study tested 185 people with normal color vision, ages 18 to 75. The ability to discriminate small color differences declined with age, particularly on the yellow-blue axis. Changes in how colors looked were small, mostly affecting settings for a pure green in daylight, which looked more yellowish to older viewers.
The author concluded that higher-level brain mechanisms compensate for losses in the eye. A University of Liverpool release summarized it as the visual brain recalibrating as we get older.
Aging Starts Earlier Than You Think
A review of the aging eye and color vision reports that normal cone sensitivity changes continuously with age, and that what we call aging begins at least by adolescence. It also says color appearance stays relatively stable despite changes in the light reaching the retina.
The review adds that losses in individual cone pathways come from both optical and neural factors. In other words, gradual change is normal, and most of it goes unnoticed.
Cataracts Can Dull and Yellow Color
The National Eye Institute says color vision may worsen with age, often because of cataracts. Because the change is gradual, a Barcelona eye center says people often notice it only after comparing the two eyes or after surgery. A London ophthalmology clinic says a cloudy lens acts like a yellow-brown filter, so blues and purples can look faded and whites can look cream or beige. It adds that color often looks brighter after surgery, with the brain adapting over days to weeks, per its cataract page.
Our guide to cataract risk factors covers prevention and nutrition.
Disease, Injury, and Medicines
NEI lists injury to the retina, optic nerve, or brain among causes of color vision deficiency, along with certain eye diseases and health problems such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. MedlinePlus names hydroxychloroquine as one medicine that can affect color vision. In glaucoma, a 1999 British Journal of Ophthalmology review reports that glaucoma is primarily associated with blue-yellow defects, though debate continues about the exact pattern.
Never stop a prescribed medicine on your own. Tell your prescriber about color changes, and read can medications cause vision problems.
Inherited Types Are Present From Birth
NEI says most people with color vision deficiency are born with it, though it sometimes does not show up until later in life, and symptoms are often mild enough to miss. So a deficiency that seems new may be an old one you only just noticed. A color test sorts this out.
Some color problems are not genetic at all, notes MedlinePlus Genetics. These acquired deficiencies can come from retinal, optic nerve, or brain conditions, certain drugs such as chloroquine, or exposure to chemicals such as organic solvents.
When to Get Checked
Gradual changes that most people share are expected. Get an exam if colors look washed out in one eye, if the change is sudden, or if it comes with pain, blur, or missing patches of vision. Seek urgent care for sudden vision loss. Routine visits help, as explained in eye exams as you age.
