During one of my daily travels around the great expanse that is the internet, I stumbled across a piece of information so shocking, so life-altering, that it shook me to my very core. Are you ready for this? Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen, as in the identical-looking twins from our childhood TV movies, AREN'T identical twins.
It's okay if you want to just take a moment to sit down after hearing that. Practice some deep breathing and stuff.
Because how? HOW when they look so exactly the same, can they be un-identical? God, the world works in mysterious ways.
But it turns out the pair, who now focus on their careers in the fashion world and tend to stay mostly out of the spotlight, have been pretty open about this nugget of gobsmacking information their whole entire lives.
They're actually 'fraternal twins', or 'sororal twins' as it's called for females. For the science types out there, what that means is that instead of being one egg which was fertilised by one sperm and split down the middle during conception, they were actually two different eggs to begin with, each fertilised by two different sperm. So the chances of them looking identical should have been pretty damn low.
But still, look at them:
That looks pretty much like the same face to me.
And here.
Oh, and here, too.
Well, would you look at that.
THEY'RE DEFINITELY IDENTICAL.
There are a couple of minor differences between the twins; for example Mary-Kate is left-handed whereas Ashely is right-handed. Ashley is also an inch shorter than her sister, and apparently she had an extra freckle on her top lip as a child, but that disappeared at some stage in her teens and they looked identical once more.
It's baffling.
But there you go, there's some interesting information you can whack out during the next awkward silence at a dinner party. Crazy.
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