Why So Many Dune Characters Have Blue Eyes

If there’s one thing you need to understand about “Dune,” it’s that spice is a hell of a drug. The Spice Melange, a substance found only on the planet Arrakis, is a drug so powerful that the entire universe basically revolves around it. Spice can significantly improve someone’s health, triple a person’s life expectancy, and can give people the ability to predict possible futures.

That last part is the most vital since the humans in the “Dune” universe have long abandoned “thinking machines,” so interstellar travel has to be done by humans steering the ship the whole time instead of advanced computers. That’s an impossible task, unless the person is heavily dosed up on spice their whole life to the point where they’re barely recognizable as human anymore. That’s what happened to the Guild Navigators, the spice-addicted space pilots that make the “Dune” world go round. The Guild Navigators haven’t been shown in the recent “Dune” films so far, but they did pop up in David Lynch’s 1984 movie, and they looked pretty gnarly. 

Thankfully, most people in the “Dune” books do not require so much spice to do their jobs, so they are rarely quite as deformed. For the regular spice-eating humans in “Dune,” the only sign of their addiction is their unnaturally blue eyes, affecting both their irises and their scleras. Outside of Arrakis, a lot of people will wear special contacts to hide the extent of their spice use. For the Fremen who live on Arrakis, where the spice is both abundant and crucial to surviving in such a harsh desert environment, it’s more common to show blue eyes with pride.

The “Dune” films that have been made so far have shown plenty of variation in what a spice-user’s eye will look like. In Lynch’s film, Paul’s eyes are a very bright blue, so much so that you couldn’t ignore it if you tried. But outside of Paul’s visions in “Dune: Part One,” Paul and Chani in Villeneuve’s films tend to have blue eyes that are a lot less pronounced. Depending on the lighting, their eyes often don’t look that blue at all. 

Meanwhile, in the books there are mentions of Fremen who are so spice-dependent that their eyes are a deep consistent indigo blue, to the point where you can’t distinguish between their pupils, irises, or schleras. It’s an eye look that hasn’t been seen on screen in the series just yet, for reasons that aren’t 100% clear. Is it because Villeneuve thinks it’ll look goofy in a visual medium? That was partially the explanation for why “Game of Thrones” chose to omit Daenerys Targaryen’s purple eyes, for instance. 

Perhaps the omission so far is because Villeneuve and the writers involved are saving the extreme blue eyes for the right dramatic moment. There’s a scene in “Dune: Messiah” (soon to be adapted into “Dune: Part Three”) that many book fans are looking forward to, in which a character intentionally overdoses on spice in an attempt to enhance their prescience, with major consequences. Perhaps Villeneuve’s movies are withholding the truly blue eyes so that this scene will have a greater impact. 

On a thematic level, it’s hard not to wonder why Herbert chose blue, given that the series’ far-out space fantasy premise offered him the chance to pick any color he wanted. Perhaps Herbert just liked the color blue, or perhaps he figured it was the best color to fit the books’ general allegory for real-world imperialism. After all, the dynamic between the Empire and the Fremen, with the more powerful group oppressing a desert-based people for the sake of their oil spice, is intentionally reminiscent of the western world’s exploitation of the oil-abundant areas in the middle east. Having the book’s big convoluted metaphor for oil-addicted imperialists involve blue eyes fits in that sense, because the United States (especially back in the ’60s, when the country was less racially diverse) has one of the highest concentrations of blue-eyed people in the world.

Most likely, however, the reason for the blue eyes is even simpler: Frank Herbert was really into mushrooms, and his friend Paul Stamets (another famous mushroom enthusiast) wrote in one of his books that Frank told him the Fremen’s eyes were inspired by the color of Psilocybe mushrooms. Similar to a heavy dose of the Spice Melange, Psilocybe mushrooms are known to give you hallucinations if you ingest them. As Stamets explained:

“Frank went on to tell me that much of the premise of Dune — the magic spice (spores) that allowed the bending of space (tripping), the giant worms (maggots digesting mushrooms), the eyes of the Freman (the cerulean blue of Psilocybe mushrooms), the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Bene Gesserits (influenced by tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred mushroom cults of Mexico) — came from his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms.”

Look: it was the ’60s, man, and a big part of the “Dune” books’ appeal were their clear psychedelic qualities. The blue eyes of the “Dune” universe are just one extension of Herbert’s willingness to get real weird and experimental with it; the fact that it also fits into the books’ political themes is a fun bonus.