A short history of googly eyes

Take a plastic shell shaped like a shallow dome. Put a small black disc inside it, loose enough to slide. Glue a white or card backing on the flat side to keep the disc in. Shake it, and the pupil skitters around inside the dome the way an eye rolls in a socket. That is the entire mechanism, and it hasn't changed. Wikipedia's own description of the object, "a white plastic or card backing covered by a clear, hard-plastic shell, encapsulating a black plastic disc" that "is allowed to move freely," matches how a Beadnova materials guide independently describes the same three layers: a base, a smaller pupil on top of it, and a shell that keeps the pupil from sliding out. Two write-ups, two industries, the same simple object. They're made in a huge range of sizes, too: Wikipedia lists shells from 3⁄16 of an inch across up to two feet, and the largest pair actually built, according to Guinness World Records, went a good deal further than that. More on that later.

A name that arrived before the object

The word predates the thing. In 1919 the cartoonist Billy DeBeck launched a comic strip about a small-time gambler named Barney Google, drawn, according to comics historian Bill Blackbeard, as a "goggle-eyed, moustached, gloved and top-hatted, bulbous-nosed, cigar-chomping shrimp." Barney's eyes were the joke, and in 1923 Billy Rose and Con Conrad turned that joke into a novelty song, "Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)," recorded over the years by Eddie Cantor, the Andrews Sisters and Spike Jones among others. That's where "googly eyes" enters the language as a description of a certain kind of comically large, rolling stare, decades before anyone was selling the plastic version.

Oddly, the dictionary record shows a second, unrelated "googly" running in parallel: a cricket delivery called a googly is documented from 1903, origin unknown, and etymonline.com separately traces "goo-goo eyes" to 1901, "perhaps connected with goggle." Two words, close in sound and roughly the same vintage, chasing two different meanings. Nobody seems to have untangled whether either influenced the other, and that's worth saying plainly rather than picking a tidy story: on the exact moment "googly eyes" became a name for a craft supply, the trail goes cold. What's documented is the craft object turning up in the mid-to-late twentieth century, cheap enough to sell by the bag, and after that the record gets much better.

From promotional pom-pom to the classroom cupboard

The clearest paper trail belongs to the Weepul, a small pom-pom with two googly eyes stuck on it, handed out for decades as a promotional freebie. Wikipedia credits its invention to Tom Blundell, an executive at the toy company BIPO, who is said to have stuck a pair of googly eyes onto a pom-pom "out of boredom" sometime in the 1970s; Blundell himself claimed 400 million Weepuls were sold between 1971 and 2012. Similar novelties followed in other countries: "Wuppies" were popular in the Netherlands in the 1980s, and "Pirilampo Mágico" ("Magic Firefly") has been sold in Portugal every year since 1987 to raise money for CERCI, a co-operative that supports people with intellectual disabilities.

By 2003 googly eyes had migrated from promotional giveaway to standalone craft supply in their own right. That year the activity-book publisher Klutz released Googly Eyes: Making Funny Faces, a photo book of household objects turned into faces, shipped with 48 pairs of self-adhesive eyes so a kid could do it themselves rather than just look at the pictures. It's a small detail, but it marks the moment the eyes stopped needing a pom-pom, a puppet, or anything else to justify their existence. They could just be applied to whatever was already sitting on the table.

Television had been doing something similar for longer, if less systematically: Wikipedia notes that Cookie Monster on Sesame Street has googly eyes, and the same rolling-pupil trick shows up wherever puppetry wants a face to read as excitable rather than composed. It's a cheap, mechanical way to make an inanimate thing look alive, which is precisely the property that would later send the eyes out of the workshop and onto the street.

Why a pair of eyes is so hard to ignore

There's a real, well-studied reason googly eyes work on almost anything: the human brain is extremely good, and extremely fast, at finding faces. A 2021 Psychology Today piece on pareidolia, the tendency to see faces in random patterns, cites face misidentifications happening in as little as 170 milliseconds, and notes that "we have no conscious control over them," which is why it's so hard to un-see a face once your brain has decided one is there. Scientific American's explanation of "eyebombing" specifically points to the fusiform gyrus, a region packed with neurons tuned to faces and eyes, and argues that two googly eyes supply so much of what that circuitry is listening for that almost nothing else is needed to read a cracked wall or a dented bin as an expression. Add the two dots, and the brain does the rest of the work for free.

The leap onto the street

The move from craft cupboard to public space, informally called eyebombing, doesn't have one clean origin either, and the honest version says so. On Flickr, a photographer named Royce Williams began documenting a "Drive-By Googly-Eyes Project" from August 2005, and a dedicated Flickr pool for the practice followed that December, according to Know Your Meme's account. Six years later, on 25 October 2011, two Danish artists (Know Your Meme doesn't name them) registered eyebombing.com specifically to "define and refine" the practice, and started posting across social platforms three days after that; coverage from sites including Laughing Squid, Gawker and Core77 through December 2011 and into 2012 is credited with pushing search interest for "googly eyes" to an all-time high that same December, per Google Trends data cited on the same page. Wikipedia adds a further, competing claim to the same lineage: the French artist Do Benracassa says the idea traces back to his own 1980s project, Ça Vous Regarde. And Scientific American's account of eyebombing credits a further, later populariser again: a Swede named only Adam, in Uppsala in January 2017, sticking eyes around town to fight winter boredom, before it spread on to Paris, London and Sofia. Four separate originators, in four different decades, all associated with the same simple act. Rather than pick one, it seems fairer to say this: putting eyes on things in public is easy enough, and funny enough, that it appears to have been reinvented independently, more than once, by people who had never heard of each other.

What happens once it reaches a city

Two recent stories show both ends of how officialdom reacts. In Boston, a small campaign called "Googly Eyes on the MBTA," led by Arielle Lok and John Sanchez, held a lightly attended rally on Boston Common in April 2024 asking the transit authority for exactly one thing. It worked: by 26 June 2024 the MBTA had fitted googly-eye decals to five vehicles, four Green Line trains nicknamed Frog, Gorf, Forg and Grof and one commuter rail train nicknamed Vilas, with spokesman Joe Pesaturo telling WBUR that "after receiving public suggestions, our team found a safe way to install these 'googly' eyes on a limited number of vehicles."

Bend, Oregon had the opposite experience. Someone kept sticking googly eyes onto public sculptures along the city's Roundabout Art Route, including a pair of bronze deer, and by the time Fortune covered it in December 2024 the story had reached The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The city wasn't amused about the bill: removing the adhesive-backed eyes from seven of eight affected artworks had already cost around $1,500, and officials worried the "Phoenix Rising" sculpture might need repainting. Communications director Rene Mitchell was careful to draw the line precisely: "We really encourage our community to engage with the art and have fun. We just need to make sure that we can protect it and that it doesn't get damaged." Two cities, the same prank, opposite outcomes, one of them entirely down to what the eyes were stuck to and how hard they were to get off again.

Which is, in its way, the whole history in miniature: a joke made of two cheap plastic discs, old enough to have forgotten its own inventor, that keeps landing on the exact same idea wherever it turns up. In August 2019, Austin McChord, Ryan Sasloe and Ed Lundblad took that idea about as far as it goes, building a Guinness-certified pair of googly eyes 366.3 centimetres across in Norwalk, Connecticut, reportedly after simply receiving a normal pair in the mail and deciding to see how big the joke could get. Most people stop well short of that. A photo, a pin, one more pair of eyes on one more ordinary thing, is plenty.

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Last update: 2026-08-25 AWST