Twin Strangers gains 500,000 users in six months helping strangers find doppelganger online

Los Angeles actor Samantha Futerman looked familiar — identical if she was being honest with herself — so she decided to send a message via Facebook.
Since that day in 2013, the pair discovered they were born on the same day in South Korea and were adopted to families living 8000 kilometres apart.
Their discovery is now the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary Twinsters, which follows their journey from the US to London and South Korea as they uncover the shared history they never knew they had.
While the fact they are related makes the story remarkable, it seems not a day goes by without someone discovering their doppelganger and sharing it online.
Earlier this week, Scottish man Neil Thomas Douglas of Scotland sat down on a Ryanair flight to Ireland when he realised he was virtually looking into a mirror. Sitting next to him was Londoner Robert Stirling who had the same red-hair, ginger beard, complexion, dark shirt and taste in budget airlines.
Understandably, the two took a selfie, which was shared on Twitter by Lee Beattie, a friend of Douglas, and it made headlines around the world.
Their story comes hot on the heels of students Ciara Murphy and Cordelia Roberts who met on a study program in Germany and couldn’t believe how similar they looked. The previous month, US women Ambra, 23, and Jennifer 33, were united within five minutes of signing up to Twin Strangers — a website that specialises in finding your identical doppelganger from anywhere in the world.
It’s no surprise, according to the website’s founder Niamh Geaney, who is certain there is at least one lookalike out there for everyone.
“Oh (I’m) convinced,” she told news.com.au from Dublin where she is based. “There’s a myth that there are seven people in the world that look like you. Now I don’t know if that’s true or not yet but I would love to try and prove it or disprove it. I’m still on the search for my five other doppelgangers. I definitely believe there’s at least one for everybody.”
The presenter and journalist made headlines earlier this year when she embarked on a search with two friends to find their doppelgangers within a month as part of an experiment ahead of a TV show on the subject.
The trio posted their pictures online and enlisted the media for help. Within two weeks she had met her own twin Karen, three years older who lived an hour away, but said it was the response to her quest that really blew her away.
“If I left my phone down for 10 minutes I would be coming back to 1000 emails from all over the world. A couple of them were people helping me but the majority of them were people asking us to help them to find their twin strangers before we had even found our own,” she said.
“That’s kind of where twin strangers the website came from … because there’s such an overwhelming interest.”
Since it began six months ago the site now has 500,000 members from Albania to Russia and Madagascar, and is growing daily partly down to the explosion of social media.
“I just think it’s like this weird kind of natural phenomenon,” she said. “It’s something that was always probably happening. Throughout history people have had doppelgangers but it’s only with the age of the internet and the age of social media that we’re beginning to see these stories.”
So what’s it like seeing your face on someone else? Ms Geaney said it’s a very “strange and surreal thing” to see another person walking around with your features.
Moments before meeting her doppelganger Karen she was questioning her decision and trying to find a reason not to go through with it until curiosity got the better of her.
“About 10 minutes before meeting her I was completely ... questioning it. Kind of thinking ‘what am I doing? Why do I want to meet someone who has my own face?’ I met her and I couldn’t believe it. I just kept staring at her and awkwardly looking,” she said. “I gave her a hug and we were chatting but for that whole day that we spent together the both of us were just staring at each other.
“If I laughed in a certain way she was like ‘oh I laugh like that’ … or I would be like ‘oh my god that’s my face’. [You’re] discovering things about each other that you see in yourself or the way you are which is quite freaky.”