Why did David Bowie have two different coloured eyes?
There are very few things about the great David Bowie that are not unique.
If the late icon wasn’t changing his on-stage persona with prolific effect, then he was in the studio delivering yet more genre-melding hit songs. However, The Starman’s ability to separate himself from the rest transcended further than just his artistic creations.
In the spring of 1962, a young David Bowie became involved in an altercation that would change his life forever. During a confrontation with his childhood friend George Underwood, Bowie suffered an injury that left him with the appearance of having two different coloured eyes.
Underwood, who went to school with Bowie, later revealed that the two had an argument over a girl, which resulted in a playground fight. With both Underwood and Bowie liking the same girl, the two had a “short-lived falling out” which turned physical.
According to Underwood, Bowie had forced his way into the reckoning in a bid to date Carol Goldsmith, the girl they both liked, having struck up a conversation at a 15th birthday party.
“Just to get the story straight, it was about a girl we both fancied,” artist Underwood told The Telegraph.
“She came to my 15th birthday party – everyone was drunk at about eight, including David”.
George Underwood
Underwood added, “I was sensible and managed a date with her. 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.”
However, later that evening, Underwood visited his youth club only to find that the girl had been waiting with Bowie. “So I was very pissed off with him, and in the morning I got on the bus to school and overheard him talking about this girl he was going out with,” he said.
“At break time, I hit him [inadvertently causing one pupil to become permanently dilated, so Bowie’s eyes appeared to be different colours]. Later, David said I did him a favour – everyone talks about his eyes, don’t they?”
The fight resulted in Bowie suffering from heterochromia, a condition which resulted in the right eye turning blue in appearance while the left eye remained a darker shade of brown, apparently due to suffering “a deep corneal abrasion and paralysis of his iris sphincter muscle”.
So, why did Bowie have different coloured eyes?
Strictly speaking, Bowie didn’t have heterochromia in the traditional sense.
Both of his irises were blue, but the injury left one pupil permanently enlarged, creating the striking illusion that each eye was a different colour. It’s a misconception that has followed him for decades, although it’s easy to understand why. Under stage lights and in photographs, the contrast was so dramatic that it became one of the most recognisable features in popular music.
Bowie embraced his unique feature throughout his career as he donned his different stage personas right up until his death in 2016, and in a strange way, the injury ended up fitting perfectly with the image Bowie would later cultivate.
Long before Ziggy Stardust arrived, there was already something otherworldly about the appearance that set him apart from the crowd of British pop hopefuls emerging in the 1960s. Combined with his appetite for reinvention, the unusual look helped reinforce the sense that Bowie existed slightly outside of ordinary rock stardom, which only added to his enduring mystique.
