Everything through the new eye looks blue tinged and TOO bright. The old eye says cream. Which eye is telling the truth?

Right eye was done on the 9th of June, distance monofocal as planned (the monovision contact lens trial and I did not get along, different story). Vision is SHARP, I can read the church notice board from the back pew, no complaints there.

But the colour. Through the new eye every white in my house has gone cold and blue-ish, like somebody swapped all my warm bulbs for the lighting in a hospital corridor. A sheet of printer paper practically glows. Cover the new eye and the world goes back to soft and warm and slightly dim. Cover the old eye and it's all blue-white and loud. They cannot BOTH be right.

The genuinely upsetting part: I'm sewing a christening gown, and the three whites I so carefully matched last month are, through the new eye, three visibly different colours. One of them is nearly BLUE. So which eye do I trust? And more to the point, is the lens they put in tinted somehow, or wrong? Second eye is booked for August and I'd like to know what I'm walking into.

Oh Betty, I had exactly this and christened it the fridge-light phase. Everything through my new eye looked like the inside of the fridge at 2am. It faded within a few weeks, so gradually I can't tell you when it ended, the brain just quietly re-mixes the paint.

Both my eyes are done now and the world is one colour again, and here's the thing, it settled much closer to the blue version than the cream one. Trust the new eye on the gown. The old eye is the one wearing tinted spectacles, we just never knew.

Two years out and I still remember the bleached fortnight, kitchen counters like fresh snow, wore my sunglasses half the day indoors and felt ridiculous. It settles. The site's piece on the first days after cataract surgery covers the brightness side of it well.

The bit that reconciled me to it: I read somewhere that Monet had cataract surgery and complained afterwards that everything looked too blue, apparently he even tinted his glasses over it. If it's good enough to bother Monet it can bother a retired plumber, and he presumably got used to it too, so I stopped fighting it.

Multifocal chap here, same fridge-light fortnight, so it's not your lens choice. Main discovery of the era: our "white" bedroom ceiling turned out to have been repainted magnolia at some point and nobody had told me. I still haven't raised it.

Betty, what you are describing has a proper name, cyanopsia, blue-tinted vision, and it is one of the most common and least explained experiences after this operation. The mechanism is worth having. Your natural lens yellows steadily over decades, and by our age it filters out a large share of the blue and violet light entering the eye. You have been looking at the world through a slowly deepening amber filter, so gradually the brain simply recalibrated and called the result "white". The new lens is optically clear, so the blue arrives again all at once, and a visual system tuned for the amber version reads everything as blue and over-bright. Your implant is not tinted and not wrong; you are experiencing the absence of a tint you never knew you had. Your thread box makes the same point in miniature: those three whites really do differ, in how much blue each reflects, and the old lens was flattening that difference. June has already given you the practical answer, match the gown with the operated eye.

What happens next: the brain's colour calibration re-balances, typically over days to a few weeks, and the tint fades from notice; comparing eye against eye keeps it noticeable for longer, so expect it to linger until the second eye is done, then resolve properly. Neither eye is lying, colour is something the brain constructs, but the new eye is much closer to what you saw at forty. Two smaller notes: all modern lens implants include an ultraviolet filter, replacing that job of the natural lens, and some models add a faint yellow blue-light filter that sits closer to the natural lens's behaviour; which type you have is in your notes, and whether it matters for your second eye is a conversation for your surgeon at review, not a decision to make from a forum. The one exception to file away: a colour change that arrives suddenly weeks or months later, or comes with new floaters, a shadow, or any loss of vision, is not this phenomenon and should be reported promptly. The site's piece on seeing clearly again after cataract surgery describes the blues coming roaring back; what it doesn't say is that for a few weeks they can roar a little too loudly, and that this is the part that settles.

Three weeks in and the fridge light has faded unless I go hunting for it, exactly as promised. I re-sorted the whole thread box using the new eye, ordered ONE white, and the gown is back on schedule. Cyanopsia has been deployed at my sewing circle to great effect.

Second eye on the 12th of August. This time I shall wave at the blue fortnight as it goes past.