What Are Eye Cones?

Vision is made possible by nerve cells on the retina of your eye known as cones. About 6 million of these cones allow us to see the world in all its colorful hues. They work together with 120 million rods, which provide black-and-white vision.

This article explains the types and structure of eye cones, how they function, and problems with your cones that can affect your vision.

Structure of Eye Cones

These light-sensitive cones are mostly concentrated in a portion of the eye's retina known as the fovea, which enables small details to come into sharp focus in bright light. These powerful little receptors get their name from their cone-like shape.

Types of Cones

Located on each of the two retinas are three different types of cones:

• Red cones, which account for 60% of all cones
• Green cones, which make up 30% of the cones
• Blue cones, limited to just 10% of the cones

Function of Cones

These cones contain photopigments, known as opsin amino acids, that are sensitive to different wavelengths of visible light. The fact is, each of the colors of the rainbow has a different wavelength. Our cones are able to capture these various frequencies thanks to these color-sensitive photopigments.

Our eyes can perceive light frequencies as short as 380 nanometers and as long as 700 nanometers. Although these cones mainly respond to light in their own color zone, zones overlap. Each can react to a variety of wavelengths.

Color Vision

Color vision brings the world to life. In bright sunshine, it's all about the cones.

For example, light bouncing off a yellow flower would stimulate both the red and green cones in your eyes. This signal would then run from the optic nerve to the brain, which interprets the type of signal coming in based on its strength. In this case, it would peg it as yellow.

On the other hand, in dim light, just the rods work. Since these are unable to see color, any object would only appear in shades of grey.

But, when it's not entirely dark, such as around dusk or twilight, both rods and cones are able to work and you see some colors, as well as shades of grey.

The red cones, or L-cones, are stimulated by long-wavelength light. The green cones, dubbed M-cones, respond to medium-wavelength light. The blue cones, called S-cones, are stimulated by short-wavelength light.

Acuity

It is the cones packed into the eye's fovea that give us our ability to pick up fine details such as small print. In the fovea, cone density is almost 200-fold higher than anywhere else in the retina.

In this region, which is located in a pit, light rays are subject to minimal scattering and distortion. Meanwhile, rods drop off precipitously here. This is also the region with the sharpest vision.

Problems With Eye Cones

Not everybody necessarily sees colors the same way. Color vision is tested with the Ishihara color palettes—a series of dots of different hues. This test, which identifies color issues, was named for Japanese ophthalmologist Shinobu Ishihara and includes numbers embedded in each of a set of circular images. The idea is to detect if you are unable to see certain colors.

Unfortunately, eye cones do not always function properly. The following are some conditions that can occur when they don't.

Color Blindness

If you are being tested with the Ishihara exam and can’t pick out some of the numbers amid the different shades of dots, it means that the color frequency isn’t registering because some of your cones aren’t functioning properly. You likely have some sort of color blindness.

The term color blindness is a bit of a misnomer, however. In most cases, this does not mean that you see the world as strictly black and white. Most colors come through as clearly as they do for anyone else. It is just certain colors that you may be unable to detect.

It may be that some of the cones in your eyes have been damaged. The most common type of color blindness, red-green color blindness, tends to be present at birth or inherited. This affects up to 8% of males but just 0.5% of females. With this type of color blindness, shades of red and green are hard to distinguish and may appear brownish instead.

Cone-Rod Dystrophies

There is a group of malfunctioning gene-related, inherited disorders known as dystrophies that can affect both cones and rods. By mid-adulthood these result in legal blindness.

Those with these dystrophies may experience the following symptoms:

• Vision loss over time
• Increased light sensitivity
• Decreased visual sharpness
• Blind spots in the center of the vision
• Loss of color perception
• Loss of peripheral vision

Blue Cone Monochromacy

One cone-related disorder, blue cone monochromacy, is also inherited. This mainly affects males. While the blue cones function perfectly normally in people with this condition, neither the red nor the green cones work properly.

Those with this condition have signs such as:

• Impaired color vision
• Low visual acuity
• Myopia (nearsightedness)
• Light sensitivity/glare issues
• Uncontrollable back-and-forth movements of the eye (known as nystagmus)

While there is no cure for this condition, it can be aided with specially-colored contact lenses or glasses. Also, low-vision aids may assist here.

Summary

Your ability to see color is made possible by nerve cells on the retina known as cones. They work together with rods (which supply black-and-white vision) to provide full-spectrum eyesight. Three types of cones absorb light from different parts of the visible spectrum: red, green, and blue.

Cones contain photopigments that are sensitive to different wavelengths of visible light. The brain interprets the type of signal coming in based on its strength and this determines which colors you see. Cone problems can lead to conditions including color blindness, cone-rod dystrophies, and blue cone monochromacy.