40 Times People Saw Their Doppelgangers In The Most Unexpected Places

Bored Panda contacted photographer François Brunelle, who has been working on his "I’m not a look-alike!" project, which seeks to find doppelgangers around the world.

Apparently, it’s not so easy to find your look-alike and it took Brunelle 5 years until people started reaching out to him. “At first, I would ask people whom I knew and thought they were look-alikes to participate in my project. Then I asked around and put some ads in the media with little or no result. Then I had a TV interview, magazine articles, and lots of web media exposure, which had lots of people around the world reaching out to me.”

Brunelle shared an insider’s view into the confusing world of doppelgangers. “Look-alikes are divided into 2 categories: One category is made up of people who have already known each other for a long time and are used to the confusion coming from their likeness. The other category is made up of people who meet for the first time in front of my camera.”

Seeing your double for the first time might come with a certain degree of apprehension which is then “followed by a state of relaxation coming from the fact that each person can relate quite rapidly to the other because that other person does not look at all like an alien.”

The photographer notices that a similar appearance helps people bond better with others but it’s not necessarily a good thing. “That’s why it is so hard to completely get rid of different forms of racism and we need to educate ourselves at being aware of that phenomenon.”

The look-alike hunter reveals how to find your double: “ask around you if someone knows someone who looks like you. You can send me a photo of yourself but the chances that I will find your look-alike are very low. Normally people who have a doppelganger or who know a pair will write to me about it and from that, eventually, I will get a new photo.”

Remember that guy at the gym you saw the other day? What if that wasn’t a mirror reflection?

Michael Sheehan, an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, researches human facial diversity. According to him, the likeliness of finding your doppelganger is a subject of statistics. “The statistical explanation is that if you shuffle a deck of cards enough times, you’re going to deal with the same hand twice at some point.” The logic works the same for our looks: “There’s a lot of diversity in the forms of human faces, but there’s still a limit to it.” In other words, the likelihood is there but it isn’t infinite.

There’s a simple explanation as to why there aren’t more doppelgangers in the world. "It's not only facial appearance but also styling, how people are presenting themselves or acting," explained Sheehan. "Context has a lot to do with looking alike as well." Just think about it⁠—same hairstyle, clothing, and gestures might create the illusion of a look-alike even if the facial features are very different. That also explains why the look-alikes are usually told that they resemble someone else but very few people actually realize their doppelganger on their own. "If people are hard to tell apart, there's more chaos and confusion," the professor adds. Mother Nature has it all planned.