David Bowie eyes: What was wrong with David Bowie's eye? Did he have a glass eye?
DAVID BOWIE had an ethereal look partly owing to his incredible eyes - but what was wrong with them to make them look this way?
David Bowie performs hit record Heroes
David Bowie's characters and stage presence attracted men and women from all over the world. Many were desperate to find out how he got his ideas for his legendary personas. Of course, one aspect of his look was something over which he had no control, but it gave him this ethereal, other-worldly look.
While many people thought Bowie was blind in one eye, or perhaps wore a glass eye, this is not the case.
However, there was a reason why his eyes looked as though they were different colours.
When you looked at Bowie from afar, he looked as though one eye was green and another was a light blue colour, but without a strong pupil.
Some would have thought this was perhaps an elaborate continuation of Bowie’s look, perhaps created by wearing contact lenses.
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However, it turns out there was an incident which led to this happening, and it is not as simple as having two different coloured eyes.
For a long time, people believed Bowie had heterochromia, which means the eyes are different colours.
However, what Bowie actually had was anisocoria, which means one pupil is bigger than the other.
This means the iris, ie the part of your eye with a colour, cannot react to light in the same way as the other eye, so it looks as though that eye is darker than the other.
Bowie’s larger pupil was the result of an incident from his childhood, which took place at a school in Bromley in January 1962.
George Underwood, a school friend of Bowie, then known as David Jones, told The Tab the full story in 2016.
He said: “I had a 15th birthday party. One of the reasons I had the party was because both of us fancied this girl.
“It was a ploy to talk to her. Before she left I asked if I could meet her at her youth club on the Wednesday at 7pm.
“Just before I was about to meet her, David phoned me and said she didn’t want to meet me, she wanted to go out with him – which was a lie.
“I went down to the youth club later and her friends said she’d been waiting the whole hour for me!”
Underwood explained how he gave Bowie a "black eye," but what he did not realise was this would leave a lasting mark when his fingernail caught Bowie in the eye.
Telling the story from his own point of view, Bowie told biographer Mark Spitz: “When I was 14 I fell in love with a girl. I was crazy about her.
“Only trouble was, my best mate had a bit of a soft spot for her too, but I was the winner. I moved in before he'd even made up his mind about how to approach her.
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“Next day I was at school boasting to my mate about what a Casanova I was and he became terribly annoyed. In fact, he threw a punch at me.
"It caught me in the eye and I stumbled against a wall and onto my knees. At first he thought I was kidding.
“It wasn't a very hard punch but obviously caught me at a rather odd angle.”
Bowie’s injury needed four months of hospital treatment, and sadly it meant he never saw clearly in that eye again, suffering from poor depth perception.
However, technically the eyes were not different colours, though in appearance they were very different indeed.
