blue contacts?

either way they looked hideous

"a wise man see's failure as progress"

Sorry I'm so late to this thread. I always thought that was an awkward choice, too.

A couple of things come to mind.

During the mid/late 1980's when this movie came out, colored contacts as a fashionable choice were kind of all the rage. Of course, in this case, highly improbable that a darker-skinned African American female would be running around with blue eyes, or that the character of an ex-con cat burglar who still does the occasional odd job while running a used bookstore would be that appearance-conscious as if to make such a choice for herself.

Whoopi was quite a hot commodity during this period after her successful comedy shows and star-making turn in COLOR PURPLE. But, you'll notice that these more secondary films that tried to capitalize on her leading/star status with noticeably lesser material struggled to give her a sense of style that matched the degree to which these movies were dependent on her.

In BURGLAR, it's a lot of black leather jackets and gloves and other dark clothes. In JUMPIN' JACK FLASH, it's a lot of "phunky fresh" colorful comfy clothes that played up the "cool" and "you so crazay" qualities of that character. In FATAL BEAUTY, it's a tad on the masculine side with a lot more angular blazers and lighter, more affluent "Beverly Hills" colors and cuts. Anyway...I would imagine these choices were essentially meant to give her a stylish edge in each character or setting, but clearly some of them worked better than others.

The blue eyes in BURGLAR do seem totally out of character and improbable, and also don't read well in close up (when tight shots on her eyes clearly reveal the seams of the contacts). But I suppose, at the time, it was theoretically giving her some kind of stylish edge or mystique or so they thought.