Mark Zuckerberg

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Clinton, Prince William Windsor and actor Eddie Redmayne have in common? They’re all men and they’re all colour blind, something they share with about 8% of men of Northern European descent.

According to The New Yorker, Zuckerberg is red-green colour blind and the only colour he can see clearly is blue. Blue also happens to be the colour dominating the Facebook brand. “Blue is the richest colour for me,” he told the magazine. “I can see all of blue.”

Academy award winning actor Eddie Redmayne, famous lead in the movie version of Les Misérables and The Theory of Everything, is also red-green colour blind. Like Zuckerberg, the colour he can see most clearly is blue and he wrote his dissertation on artist Yves Klein, celebrated for his electric blue colour paintings. Redmayne said in an interview: “I wrote 30,000 words on this colour, and I never grew tired of it. The pigment is staggering.”

Redmayne also admitted relying on his girlfriend for matching his red-carpet outfits: “I’m lucky to be with someone who is very supportive,” he said.

The hereditary red-green colour blindness is more prevalent in males than females as the genes responsible are located in the X chromosome - which in women is compensated for by the other X chromosome.