The tech magazine MIT Technology Review published an article detailing a mathematical study by mathematician Jonathan Touboul. The study, titled "The Hipster Effect", explored why people who try hard to avoid mainstream trends (anti-conformists) often end up all looking and dressing exactly the same anyway.

To illustrate the article, the editors used a stock photo of a man with a heavy beard, flannel shirt, and beanie. The Independent

Shortly after it went live, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, received a furious email from an angry reader.

"You used my picture without my permission! This is slandering me by calling me a hipster. I'm taking legal action!" Wanting to avoid a lawsuit, the magazine's creative director immediately contacted the stock photo agency (Getty Images) to double-check the model's release form and license.

Getty pulled the original archives for the photograph, checked the official release paperwork signed by the actual model, and wrote back to the magazine with a hilarious discovery:

The model in the photo was a completely different person.

The man who threatened to sue for slander was not the man in the photo. He was simply a bearded, beanie-wearing guy who looked so identical to the stock photo model that he had mistaken a complete stranger for himself.

When the magazine gently informed the angry reader that he was complaining about a photo of someone else, he quietly backed down.

As the editor-in-chief later noted, the indignant hipster had inadvertently provided the most flawless, real-world empirical proof imaginable for the very mathematical paper he was complaining about: hipsters try so hard to look unique that they can't even tell themselves apart.