What do you see that (most) other people don't see?

What do you have a trained eye for?

One time a woman I’d never met before complimented me on the color of my lipstick. To my amazement, she correctly identified the manufacturer and the shade by name. I had, as usual, applied it very lightly and blotted it, and it wasn’t a new or particularly distinctive shade.

What made this so remarkable was not just that she was noticing it from halfway across a fairly large room but that the room was a common room in an alcohol and drug rehab facility. I was there to visit a relative, and she was a new client, which meant that she was in some fairly intense stage of messed-up-ness. And yet she had the presence of mind and the focus to recognize with an extreme degree of accuracy a cosmetic product on someone she’d never seen before. It turned out that she’d been a cosmetic sales person for a long while, but still.

I couldn’t begin to do that. But I will see a backward apostrophe in 7-point print on paper, or a hyphen that should be an en dash, or a wrongly italicized virgule (/ versus /), and it doesn’t seem exceptional to me. That’s because I can do it—my eye is trained for it.

What are you able to see that most people will never notice?

Topic tags: vision, perception, discernment, professional training, observation.