James' World 2

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Sometimes, when the sex is really good, the colors come.

As Holly approaches orgasm, a pastel filter descends over her vision, lasting through her climax and into the afterglow. She tends to see just one or two hues in the form of blurry orbs: seafoam green, bright yellow, black and red, hot pink or white. It’s like peering through tinted glasses, she says, or looking up at an aurora-splashed sky. (Because of the intimate nature of the subject matter, some of the sources interviewed for this story asked to be identified only by their given name or to remain anonymous.)

“It’s been happening as long as I’ve been having sex, as far as I know,” says Holly, a 26-year-old from California—though it doesn’t happen every time. “It’s gotten more intense and colorful as my connections have been better and my orgasms have been better.” When, at 20 years old, she first talked about her experiences with her friends, they were bemused. “I didn’t feel surprised,” she says. “It was just kind of affirming that it was special.”

In people with synesthesia, the brain’s sensory wiring can get crossed. Orgasm synesthesia, or sexual synesthesia, is a little-known form of the phenomenon. Roughly 4 percent of people experience some kind of synesthesia; a common form is the association of colors with certain letters, numbers or sounds. In people with sexual synesthesia, it’s the sensation of orgasm (or occasionally even sensual touch) that provokes the wash of color.

This experience might be more common than we realize: to seek personal accounts, I reached out to friends and my wider communities in New Zealand, asking to hear from anyone who sees colors when they orgasm—and around a dozen immediately responded with their stories.

Some people describe their colors as “like stained glass in a cathedral,” while for others, they’re more like “artisanal soaps” or “paint being hurled at a canvas.” Francesca Radford, a 33-year-old who lives in Auckland, says she tends to see patterns, usually zebra print or reptile scales. Rob, a Web developer in Wellington, says he has had orgasms that begin with pinprick of light and grow into a chaotic mandala, accompanied by vibrations and a roaring in his ears. Cherry Chambers, a bookkeeper from Auckland, once felt she was “shot up out of the deep ocean into a night sky—basically a whirl of colors rushing past,” she says. “That was one of the most intense orgasms I have ever had.”This curious phenomenon has been sporadically documented for decades—the first academic mention is in a 1973 book by psychologist Seymour Fisher called The Female Orgasm—but it has received very little scientific attention, says Richard Cytowic, a pioneering synesthesia expert and a professor of neurology at George Washington University.

In the 1980s Cytowic had to convince colleagues that synesthesia itself was worthy of scientific investigation. This type of sensory crossover is now widely accepted and studied, but its sexual variety is less so. “It’s the kind of thing that’s going to raise eyebrows in university departments,” Cytowic says. “Even though sex is wildly popular, science about it is not.”

Now, though, neuropsychology researcher Cathy Lebeau is trying to learn more. Lebeau, whose own form of synesthesia makes her perceive letters as colored, became fascinated by accounts that suggested that sexual synesthesia could alter consciousness. For her doctoral research at the University of Quebec, she and her supervisor, neuropsychologist François Richer, interviewed 16 people with sexual synesthesia (who all also had other forms of synesthesia) and 11 people with no synesthesia, and had them complete a series of standardized questionnaires.

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