Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

For 22 years, LaGrange College senior Mac Erves has been colorblind. Now, thanks to friends, he has seen the colors red and green for the first time.

An emotional video showing Erves seeing everyday objects in full color has gone viral. In the video, Erves puts on a pair of colorblind glasses.

“Bro, there’s no way y’all see that,” he shouted in the video. “This is what y’all see?”

With tears in his eyes, Erves approached a red car screaming with excitement. Erves’ video has had more than 180,000 comments and 31,000 retweets on Twitter and thousands of views on Instagram. It has gained attention from like Oprah Magazine and the Today Show.

“I didn’t know I was colorblind till I was about 11 when I went to a doctor’s appointment,” Erves said. “Everything was going fine and at the end until he told me he was going to have me take a colorblind test. At first, I was getting a couple of answers right but then toward the end, I thought the questions were a trick question because I couldn’t see the numbers in the circle. There was nothing there.”

Reds and greens have always been colors that Erves couldn’t see, and he said that would sometimes make other colors look different.

Erves is an outfielder for the LaGrange College baseball team and he’d never seen what his baseball uniform truly looked like.

“I had no idea that red was so bright and our uniforms are red,” Erves said. “I had no idea how bright they are. All reds have always just been such a dull color.”

When Erves was little. he used to color in stoplights with burgundy and blue replacing red and green.

Erves said he would always joke with his friends about being colorblind and had mentioned once or twice about the glasses.

“I had mentioned once before that I really wanted them just to be able to see what everyone else sees,” Erves said.

“We’re all still in college so for birthdays we never really did gifts and instead just tried to have fun together and make memories. For my birthday on Jan 3, my friend walked into the room and hands me a bag.”

Unbeknownst to Erves, the ability to see colors for the first time was sitting in that bag.

“I was like, wow, this is really about to happen and then I put them on,” Erves said.

“Everything looked so alive and vibrant. The world just came alive, and I was in awe of everything I saw.”

Erves said the glasses have changed his life.

“I was always a little sad because I couldn’t see true colors,” Erves said.

Erves, who is studying Digital Creative Media and Film, will now be able to wear his glasses when making or editing videos in class.

Before, Erves said he didn’t know what he was missing out on. Now, he never wants to take the glasses off.

“It’s all just so beautiful,” Erves said.

Visit The LaGrange Daily News website at www.lagrangenews.com to see the video of Erves trying on the glasses for the first time.