Washington Woman Meets Doppelganger from Australia for First Time
The women look like they could be twins but are 100 percent not related.
— -- An updated version of this report will air on ABC News "Nightline" on Tuesday, July 12 at 12:35 a.m. ET
Maddy Renslow and Amber Eckart might look like twins, but believe it or not, they are complete strangers.
The two women are doppelgangers, a phenomenon in which two people look nearly identical; sometimes they're entirely unrelated.
They found each other through the website TwinStrangers.com, which was co-founded by Niamh Geaney.
Geaney's own first experience meeting her doppelganger went viral and has been viewed more than 8.1 million times on YouTube. Since her first meeting, she's already met two others; That's a total of three people who look just like her!
"I think people want to find their twin strangers out of curiosity. It's not a burning desire to find someone who looks like you. It's more like, 'That will be interesting. That will be fun,'" Geaney told ABC News' "Nightline."
Geaney co-founded TwinStrangers.net to help people all over the world in their search for their own doppelgangers. She said the website has over 1 million people registered and helped make thousands of doppelganger matches.
To use the website, users upload two photos of themselves and can select people with similar features, ages and ethnicities.
"If you were to go into my filter here, you'll see that I'm showing people between the ages of 23 and 33 that are Caucasian and have selected my exact features," Geaney explained. "And then if I like someone, I can pick them … And then what happens is they go into my twins, and then from here you're like, 'Oh, they really look like me.' You can star them, and once you star them they get sent a notification, and ... My picture will then appear at the top of their twin screen list."
"Nightline" and Twin Strangers brought together doppelgangers Amber Eckart from Perth, Australia, and Maddy Renslow from Tacoma, Washington to meet for the first time in Los Angeles. They first saw each other on TwinStrangers.com.
When Eckart saw Renslow's photo on the website, she said she was taken aback by their similarities.
"They sent me a photo of Maddy to ask if I thought we were similar or anything. The kind of top half of her face started loading and I actually thought it was a picture of me. Then the rest loaded and I was like, 'Wow, that's insane,'" Eckart, 22, told "Nightline." "Our eye color's the same as well, which I thought was really weird because it's not like brown or anything. We have like green-y brown I guess."
"I saw the similarities with our eyes especially. I never really met anyone that looked like me so seeing her picture was kind of weird because that's the first time I'd ever seen anyone that even looked remotely similar," Renslow, 23, told "Nightline."
As the two spent time together, they noticed even more similarities they had to each other.
"Just before when we were eating breakfast together, everyone freaked out because we ate something the same way," Eckart said.
"I cut hair for a living which was ironic because...I didn't learn makeup particularly, but I did learn some makeup in cosmetology school and that's what she does. And we graduated the same year out of that," Renslow said.
Even Renslow and Eckart's boyfriends were confused at times, because they cut and dyed their hair the same way.
To see if there was a genetic reason for their similarities, Renslow and Eckart agreed to take a DNA test that Ancestry.com agreed to process for free.
But the results came back showing that they are 100 percent not related. However, they do have similar European roots.
Despite the results, they say that the bond they have is still going strong.
"I feel like I've known you like pretty much my whole life," Eckart told Renslow.
"It's been like comfortable the whole time," Renslow said.
