The long-lived urban legend that Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest reflects the historical popularity of such contests. Lately, lookalike contests have made a major comeback, thanks in part to a viral Timothée Chalamet contest that took place in New York City last month.
Why is it that so many guys out there look strikingly like heartthrob Timmy? Research suggests that the most compelling lookalikes, the Chalamet doppelgängers, have similar genetic traits, despite not being biologically related. Odds are, scientists have found, you might even have a doppelgänger out there too.
But just because someone looks like the Dune and Wonka actor, does that mean they also have some of his effortless coolness and stage presence too?
Dempsey Bobbitt, 18, attended the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York on Oct 27, 2024. The contest assembled dozens of the celebrity’s lookalikes.
Photograph by Jeenah Moon, The Washington Post/Getty Images
The genetic similarities between two similar looking peopleManel Esteller, a molecular geneticist based at the Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Spain, tested the genetic similarities between the lookalikes depicted in French-Canadian photographer François Brunelle’s fascinating series “I’m not a look-alike!” which has been ongoing since 1999.
“He thought that I was crazy because usually artists do not receive calls from scientists,” Esteller remembered. Brunelle put Esteller in touch with the pairs of “twin strangers” from his photographs, from all over the world, who sent the researchers genetic samples in the form of mouth swabs. Esteller and his team spent four years collecting and correlating the genetic data before publishing the results in 2022.
First they identified which of the lookalikes actually looked the most alike.
“It was very objective,” Esteller says. “These people were run [through] three facial algorithms, the same used by police and in airports,” and the ones that were algorithmically indistinguishable from actual identical twins were selected for further study.
Molecular geneticist Manel Esteller used facial recognition software to identify similar looking strangers. Their DNA revealed the same genetic variants were responsible for their shared physical features.
Photograph by François Brunelle, @francoisbrunelle.doubles (Top) (Left) and Photograph by François Brunelle, @francoisbrunelle.doubles (Bottom) (Right)
The genomes of this selection of doppelgängers were directly compared, along with their epigenomes (the chemical changes to DNA that affect how it is expressed), and microbiomes.
Esteller’s conclusion was that—while their epigenomes and microbiomes were completely different—unrelated lookalikes do in fact share distinct parts of their genetic makeup. He explained that the genetic sequences which control features such as bone structure, skin pigmentation, and water retention, all affect the way a human face looks. On the human genome, these sequences include polymorphic sites, in which a single base pair of DNA features different variants throughout the population—and the lookalikes shared the same variations.
Genetic comparisons ensured that the “ultra-look-alikes” studied were not actually related, and that their similarities in appearance and genome were purely coincidental. Ultimately, Esteller points out, there are only so many ways to put a human face together.
“There are so many people in the world right now, that eventually, people that share a higher number of [genetic] variants are expected,” he explained.
By proving that people who resemble each other share certain genes, Esteller hopes to advance diagnostic science by using facial recognition to make earlier diagnoses of rare genetic diseases in children.
The genetic basis of personalitiesAnother scientist who used Brunelle’s photo project as the basis for a scientific investigation was Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology at the California State University, Fullerton, where she is the director and founder of the Twin Study Center. Her research mainly focuses on twins, but when she learned of Brunelle’s project, she saw an opportunity to settle a small but vocal scientific debate.
“[Some scientists] believe that twins’ personality similarities are not due to their genetic commonality, but rather due to the fact that people treat them alike based on their appearance,” Segal explained. If these critics were right, “then these unrelated lookalikes should be as alike in personality as identical twins raised apart.”
She recruited lookalikes from Brunelle’s subjects—as well as some pairs she happened to stumble across in real life, on campus and at conferences—and gave them a personality questionnaire that measured openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and stability, a.k.a. the Big Five of personality studies. The resulting scores were compared to different groups of twins, including ones raised apart from each other.
To her satisfaction Segal found that lookalikes had no odds of sharing personality traits, compared to twins who had a statistically more likely chance of sharing these characteristics.
The unrelated lookalikes also didn’t resemble each other when Segal measured their self esteem. “These unrelated lookalikes were very, very different,” she said.
Fascination with our living reflections Even though Segal has proved that personalities between doppelgängers are far more dissimilar than personalities between twins, the “twin strangers” of Esteller’s study shared more than similar faces—thanks to genes that controlled the length of their bones, they might have similar gaits.
“If one was a smoker, the other was likely a smoker” and vice versa, Esteller said, because addictive personalities are in part a genetic trait, as is handedness and shortsightedness.
A Timothée Chalamet lookalike might have a similar walk and voice to Timmy himself, but he wouldn’t necessarily have the same charisma and talent.
For those out there wondering if they might be able to find their own lookalike, both Segal and Esteller point out the wide availability of online platforms for doing just that, such as twinstrangers.net and Reddit’s /r/Doppelgangers. But as Segal reminds us, “A lot of these people are going to be disappointed, because just looking like someone does not mean that you’re going to be alike.”
Though they met during Brunelle’s original photo sessions, the lookalikes who participated in Esteller’s, and Segal’s studies did so remotely, and relationships between them weren’t part of the research.
But humans do broadly tend to be attracted to people who resemble themselves. “I think it tells us about human nature in the sense that we all crave similarity,” Segal says. “We want something similar to us. When young children have imaginary friends, they’re always like them.”
Esteller heard tell that two of the lookalikes from one of Brunelle’s photos even became a couple and got married.
So it’s possible that even if a few of the Timothées didn’t win the $50 prize offered by the organizer, they might have won an even better prize—friendship.
Source : National Geographic