It’s an awkward experience when you call out to someone, convinced it is a friend, but they turn round and you see it is a complete stranger. This type of instance happens because people look alike. Some people may even look so alike to others that they are called twins, doubles, or doppelgängers. At BYU-Hawaii, there are plenty of students that look like a another person. Finding people who look alike is a rewarding experience for Peri Cook, a sophomore studying graphic design from Arizona. Cook said that this was something she found especially fun and enjoyed doing. She started an Instagram page called byuh_twinssss, which compared the appearance of students to other students and celebrities. “For some reason I can do it really often,” Cook shared. She said she finds most people’s “doubles” among celebrities, though there are some who look alike. “It’s like a game. I’ll meet someone, and I will think they look like someone else, and sometimes it will be a random person from my ward or someone I used to babysit. It’s just funny to see similarities and to see people agree with me.”Someone featured on the page is Marshall Smith, a sophomore studying biology from Washington. Smith said that people have told him that they thought they saw him on campus and yelled his name to someone who turned out to not be him.One of those people is Blake Meeley. When asked on what he thinks is most similar between Smith and Meeley, Smith said, “Third party vote says our hair. I would probably go with our hair because he’s got a nice set of hair.”Not everybody is completely identical, but some can come really close, and there are other people such as Cook who love to find the similarities between two completely different people, such as Francois Brunelle, a photographer in Canada. Brunelle compiles and takes pictures of people who look similar. A project called Twin Stranger finds people who look alike. Masaki Yamanashi, a junior studying biology from Japan, said if he found someone that looked like him, “I would be really excited. I would laugh a lot with that person. I would like to get to know that person and experience their life so I could see the similarities in our lives, not just facial features.”Uploaded July 1, 2015
Writer: Rachel Reed
