An innocent Reddit post asking for help identifying the face of a mystery celebrity would spark a four-year-long international search involving facial recognition technology and photo copyright infringement.

As Boing Boing reported yesterday, the wild story — that became known as “Celebrity Number Six” — began in 2020 when a Finnish Reddit user posted a photo of curtains that had eight famous faces on them. Reddit quickly identified all the celebrities, including Orlando Bloom, Jessica Alba, and Josh Holloway. All except one face.

The Search for Celebrity Number Six

As the source photo for each famous face was tracked down, number six continued to evade the Reddit sleuths, who couldn’t even agree on the gender of the person. The original post was shared to r/TipOfMyTongue, but the search for number six widened to other subreddits and, eventually, r/CelebrityNumberSix was created to focus efforts.

According to Wikipedia, one Redditor searched through every picture taken by a photographer-of-interest between 1998 and 2007 on the Getty Images archives in a bid to find number six. But no luck.

The community began keeping spreadsheets of all the possible celebrities it could be. Popular guesses included Olivia Wilde or Taylor Kitsch, but no source photo could be found.

Leticia Sardá

A Reddit user took the image from the curtains, colorized it, and then ran it through facial recognition website PimEyes. The tool returned a prominent name: Leticia Sardá.

A Spanish Reddit user and member of r/CelebrityNumberSix contacted photographer Leandre Escorsell, a fellow Spaniard who photographed Sardá. Escorsell was shown the image and recognized it immediately. Escorsell expressed disappointment that his photo had been used on the fabric without permission, but he sent over the original photo to put the mystery to bed once and for all.

Lost Media

Celebrity Number Six is a great example of the lost media phenomenon, where the author or provenance of a piece of content is unknown and online detectives do their best to put the pieces back together.

“Omg. What’s gonna happen? Why me?” Sardá said in an AMA session a couple of years ago when asked about her response. The Spanish model had no idea that so many people were searching for her.

“I didn’t think much about this and suddenly everyone wants to know about me and I’m just trying to show there is a real person behind the picture,” she says. “But since it happened, let’s have fun with it, maybe I can make some new friends or go on new adventures. I’m enjoying it and having fun.”

Sardá quit modeling in 2009 to care for her ailing grandmother. She has since sold prints of the original photo and has resumed her modeling career.

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