Man Sees World in Pink After Orgasm-Induced Synesthesia

One lucky guy seems to be experiencing the world’s most colorful sex. His rare form of synesthesia is triggered by orgasm, causing him to briefly see the world in hues of pink. And as a teenager, bouts of pain caused by a heart condition manifested for him as sensations of whiteness, his doctors describe in a case report.

Doctors in Mashhad, Iran, originally reported on the medical oddity in 2022 in the Iranian Journal of Psychiatry. Their patient was a 31-year-old married man, nicknamed “Mr. R,” who was referred to their psychiatry clinic after he began to have bizarre experiences after his orgasms. Soon after he climaxed, his vision dramatically changed, becoming sharper, brighter, and pinker. In his own words, he suddenly had “high contrast vision with dominant pink color everywhere.”

The man’s color vision and neurological functioning were found to be perfectly normal, and he had no other relevant health problems. The doctors told the man that he was likely experiencing synesthesia, a condition where someone’s perception of the world is somehow routed through different or more senses than typical. This mix-up in the brain’s processing of information might cause someone to experience certain tastes when reading words or to feel colors associated with specific sounds. After listening to this explanation, the man recalled another time in his life when he experienced unusual color perception. When he was younger, he would have episodes of severe chest pain caused by a heart valve disease. During these episodes, the man would feel “white.” This feeling never showed up when he was hurt by other things, and when the episodes of chest pain faded away as he became an adult, so did the feeling.

Synesthesia isn’t especially rare, with as much as 4% of the world thought to have some version of it. But the man’s form of it does seem to be especially novel. According to the doctors, having an “orgasm in color is among the rarest types of synesthesia.” The man’s pain-color synesthesia is also weirder than usual, since it was only triggered by one specific type of pain.

Baffling as the condition might have been at first, it doesn’t seem to have affected him for the worse. The doctors report that he had no erectile dysfunction and that he felt satisfied with his sex life. Seeing colors after sex might not be the superpower I’d ask for if given the chance, but it still sounds pretty cool.