Do Yellow Night Driving Glasses Work?

We’ve all seen those fancy infomercials. With nearly miraculous yellow tinted glasses, driving at nighttime becomes a breeze! Surely this is a scam, right? Well, these glasses actually have some merit. Now, they won’t fix everything, but they can potentially help you see a little better at nighttime.

Our eyes are finely tuned for the daytime. In a spectrum of colors, the predominant daytime color is yellow. Yellow happens to be smack dab in the middle of the color spectrum. And it’s no coincidence that the night driving glasses also happen to be yellow. So what makes yellow so important?

Within optics, there exists a phenomena called chromatic aberration. Like how a prism can separate light into a rainbow, normal lenses (such as what we have in the eye) do the same thing but just to a very small degree (mini rainbows). This means that the colors red, yellow, and blue all focus at slightly different points in the eye. If you have perfect vision or a perfect glasses prescription, everything is optimized to split the difference between red (the shortest wavelength) and blue/violet (the longest wavelengths) to keep everything as close as possible to being focused on the retina. Because yellow is in the middle of those two, yellow light ends up being focused right smack dab on the retina.

So what happens at night? During night, blues take on a more predominant role in our vision. Because blue light may not be focused exactly on the retina, things can be a hair blurry. Yellow-tinted glasses changes all that blue light into the nicely optimized yellow light bringing things in ever-slightly more focus; helping to improve what we see when we are driving at night!

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