According to a study, lookalikes share DNA and personality attributes.
Inspired by his discovery of his look-alike, the English actor Rowan Atkinson, and François Brunelle, a Canadian artist and photographer, began recording look-alikes in a picture series called "I'm not a look-alike!" in 1999.
The project was a huge success on social media and other parts of the internet, but it also grabbed the attention of geneticists.
Manel Esteller of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, in particular.
Esteller had previously examined the physical distinctions between identical twins, and he wanted to investigate the opposite: people who appear alike but aren't related. "What's the deal with these people?" he pondered.
Esteller and his colleagues set out to classify strangers with objectively similar face traits on a molecular l...