David Bowie wasn’t just known for his music. He adopted multiple stage personas over the years, each with their own distinct look—but that wasn’t the only notable thing about his appearance. He was also known for his strikingly different-colored eyes, one blue, one black.
What Gave Bowie’s Eyes That Look?
The cause of Bowie’s different-colored eyes has often been mistaken for heterochromia, in which the irises are two different colors. It’s a very rare hereditary condition, although it is more common in animals, and Bowie did not have it. Instead, his condition was caused by damage to his left eye.
While at school at Bromley Technical College in 1962, Bowie got into a fight with his friend George Underwood over a girl when both men were just teenagers.
“I was sensible and managed a date with her,” Underwood told The Telegraph in 2019. “David phoned me on the day and said she had told him she didn’t want to meet me because she wanted to go out with him.”
Underwood punched Bowie in his left eye, causing significant damage—Bowie had a tear in the iris’s sphincter muscle. As a result, he was hospitalized for four months, during which he underwent multiple operations. He was left with a condition called anisocoria, a condition where the pupils are different sizes. In Bowie’s case, his left eye was permanently dilated, creating the illusion that his eyes were two different colors. He also struggled with depth perception in that eye.
“It wasn’t a very hard punch but obviously caught me at a rather odd angle,” Bowie later told biographer Mark Spitz.
Bowie and Underwood had been friends since childhood, but the incident caused a temporary rift between them. They later repaired their friendship and played in bands together, including Bowie’s first band, the Konrads.
Eventually, Underwood went a different direction and pursued a career in art. The two men collaborated throughout Bowie’s career, with Underwood designing some of Bowie’s early album covers.
Underwood later claimed Bowie eventually thanked him for the punch. “Everyone talks about his eyes, don’t they?” he once said. He had a point.
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