Isopogon heterophyllus is a shrub that typically grows to a height of with smooth brown or reddish brown branchlets. The leaves are up to about long, prickly, variably simple, pinnate or bipinnate, the segments up to long. The flowers are arranged in spherical,
sessile heads about long in diameter on the ends of branchlets, each head with usually pink, sometimes lilac to mauve flowers up to about long, the heads with egg-shaped
involucral bracts at the base. Flowering occurs from August to November and the fruit is a hairy
nut up to long, fused in a cone-shaped to spherical head in diameter. ==Taxonomy and naming==