Spot the difference - if you can: Miss Korea beauty queens picture goes viral

Eight of the Miss Korea 2013 contestants.  

Photographs of a Korean beauty pageant have sparked fierce debate over the country's apparent obsession with plastic surgery - because the contestants all look strikingly similar.

After appearing on a Japanese blog posted on link sharing site Reddit, the pictures of the 20 beauty queen hopefuls went viral.

'Redditor'  ShenTheWise  published them with the caption: "Korea's plastic surgery mayhem is finally converging on the same face. Here are the miss korea 2013 contestants."

The story was then picked up by several leading publishers, including Britain's Daily Mail and The Huffington Post.

According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, South Korea has the highest instance of plastic surgery in the world with one in five women in Seoul going under the knife in 2011.

Reddit user HotBrownie posted: "Those women in fact do look unnervingly similar and yes, Koreans think so too. This is because they all get the exact same plastic surgeries and the surgeons follow the same formulas for noses and eyes and everything else theyve had done (fillers, cheek and forehead implants, eye surgery, nose surgery, jaw reduction, breast job, calf muscle job, fat grafting etc).

"In certain areas of Seoul, you would think all the women are sisters because they look so similar due to same surgeries."