The Twin Strangers: How two identical looking girls found each other for the first time

Three friends from Dublin City University – Harry English, Terence Manzanga and Niamh Geaney – placed a unique bet at the end of March this year. They gave each other a month to find each others doppelganger, and called it the Twin Strangers challenge.

Their website explains the idea in detail: “They say there are 7 people in the world who look exactly like you…we want to find OUR Twin Strangers. Whoever finds the closest match wins the competition but they only have ONE MONTH to do it! Do you look any of us? Do you know anyone who looks like us?! Upload your photos or share this page with your friends to help us find our perfect Twin Stranger!" 

While it seems a bit bizarre to give yourself a month to look for a lookalike, Niamh found her doppelganger, Karen Branigan, within 2 weeks, and she was living barely an hour away from her in Ireland too.

“I found Karen through the power of social media and this weekend we met up in real life!,” Niamh wrote on their Facebook page . “Not going to lie – we were both were pretty freaked about seeing our double in the flesh.”

“For the entire duration of our encounter, I pretty much stared at her,” Niamh told the Daily Mail . “I couldn’t get over her face, and some of the expressions she would pull I would think to myself or say aloud, ‘Oh my God, that’s my face.’ I can’t remember the number of times I said ‘this is so freaky.’ It was truly amazing.”

The YouTube video of the two girls meeting each other for the first time went completely viral on YouTube, with 2 million views. To make themselves look more like one another, they made themselves up and bonded through the process.

Niamh is way ahead of the two boys, who haven’t yet caught up with someone so identical looking. Thousands of people send in their photos everyday, but Niamh is the only one who has come this close to finding her “twin”.

‘It would be amazing if it was someone from some other country,’ she said, in this Metro UK report , adding, “It would be great if they were in Hawaii or something…we could go over and meet them and have a cup of tea.”

Watch the video of the girls meeting for the first time: