A mystery that gripped the internet for years has been solved: Meet 'Celebrity Number Six'
An enduring internet mystery years in the making has finally been solved.
If you are not a frequent inhabitant of social media sites like Reddit, you may have never heard of the infamous "Celebrity Number Six," the unidentified face printed onto a piece of fabric showcasing otherwise familiar figures like Jessica Alba, Ian Somerhalder and Orlando Bloom.
Reddit user TontsaH originally posted images of the fabric to the subreddit r/movies five years ago, saying, "I have had curtains made of this fabric over 10 years (maybe from 2008) but I still haven't recognized all movie stars. Hopefully, you can help me to recognize them and find the corresponding photo of the celebrity."
The post linked to external image hosting site Imagr, on which the poster had labeled their guess as to who each printed illustration was meant to represent and what specific photo it was pulled from. With the subreddit's hive mind activated, any identity on the eight-person pattern still up for question was quickly put to rest and matched with its real-life inspiration.
All except one, that is.
Labelebed in the lineup as "Celebrity Six," the image of a woman with shoulder-length hair, high cheekbones, thick brows and smoldering supermodel-esque expression left posters stumped. In the original thread, people threw around guesses like Sienna Miller and River Phoenix, but no one could seem to find a source image.
Not long after the post went up, TontstaH commented that "#6 is now the last one to solve!"
A netizen simply scrolling past would likely assume Number Six's identity was soon to follow; the rest of the celebs had been identified quickly, even those that required some digging within the annals of the internet history and print media. Instead, the identity of this elusive figure turned into something of fundamental internet lore, capturing the minds of casual browsers and amateur sleuths alike for half a decade.
The five-year search for Number Six
A subreddit dedicated entirely to identifying Number Six, aptly named r/CelebrityNumberSix, cropped the same year, compiling and amassing information from thousands of users.
The Q&A of the sub, which has blown up to over 44,000 members strong in recent days, lays out all the information a lover of lost media could want.
The fabric itself came from a summer 2009 edition of an Anttila catalog. It was made in a pop art style popular in the 2000s and was frequently spotted in Finland, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Spain. A supplier of the fabric, "Latky Mraz," had already been contacted to no avail. No one could quite decide if they thought Number Six was male or female.
Years of investigation produced countless posts, videos, searches, hand-recreated photos and beyond. Still, nobody could produce a solid answer.
Then, just a few days ago, along came users StefanMorse and IndigoRoom. In a later post explaining how they cracked a years-old internet mystery, StefanMorse said they took the notorious image of Six and edited it "into oblivion" by hand.
"I practically took the fabric and made it seem less like a fabric and more like a real person, it still looked a bit like a cartoon and not like a real image, more so a mix of a fabric image and an animated looking real person, but the results I got from it were legitimately impressive," they said.
From there, they took the results and put them into a facial recognition and reverse image search software Pimeyes. After searching the same image multiple times, one kept popping up, and it came with a name.
IndigoRoom took over from there, tracking down the photographer of the original image that matched that of Number Six and confirming what the internet perhaps thought it would never know: Celebrity Number Six had a name, and it was Leticia Sarda.
Who is Leticia Sarda?
Leticia Sarda is a 43-year-old Spanish model currently living on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, according to Sarda's newly-created Instagram and an interview with The New York Times.
Now a mother of two, Sarda told The Times she used to travel the globe modeling for major brands and that the image in question had come from an editorial for a 2006 edition of Spanish publication Woman magazine. A different image of her sporting a Versace dress had appeared on the same edition's cover.
When a person she didn't recognize reached out to her asking for confirmation that the image was, in fact, of her face, she had no idea that the seemingly random email was the accumulation of a five-year investigation conducted by thousands of minds online.
"[The image] was in my agency book," she told The Times. "I didn’t think I had it because I didn’t look at that book for the last 10 years, but I had it."
For extra confirmation, she posted an image of herself holding the original photo online, captioned in Spanish, "What a crazy week .... here I am setting up my new account..."
Having quit modeling in 2009, Sarda had no expectations that a nearly 20-year-old editorial shoot would come back to capture the attention of thousands and perhaps even millions. She told The Times that people have been calling out to her on the streets and contacting her through a plethora of online apps since she was identified.
About her feelings on the viral attention, she told the Times, "I really don’t know yet. It’s been too much for me for the last few days....So many of these people have been looking for me for so long and taking effort to find me. It makes me happy in a certain way. It makes me worried also. I’m trying to give them what they were looking for because they made a lot of effort, you know, just to find a person on a fabric."
As for the Subreddit? That's still anyone's guess. Maybe the sleuths who solved this lost media case will turn their attention to other internet-famous mysteries like "The Mysterious Song," as one user suggested. But that's another rabbit hole for a different day.
USA TODAY has reached out to Sarda and Reddit users StefanMorse and IndigoRoom for comment.