Celebrity Number Six: A Years-Old Internet Mystery is Solved

Over the weekend, Redditors unearthed a years-old photo of  Leticia Sardá, a Spanish model whose identity had been baffling internet sleuths for five years. Called “Celebrity Number Six” on Reddit,  a stylized drawing of the Sardá photo appeared on a fabric, alongside a number of other celebrities. This is the latest in a series of high-profile internet mysteries and lost media discoveries in 2024. Besides Celebrity Number Six, internet detectives have unearthed the source of the original, viral photo of The Backrooms and identified the musicians behind “Ulterior Motives.”

The fabric had originally surfaced online in 2020, with a user sharing a photo and asking the internet to help them identify the various pop art drawings on the fabric. It didn’t take too long before seven of the eight images were identified, and the photos used as the artist’s source material shared as well. The other celebrities include Adriana Lima (who for some reason appears twice), Josh Holloway, Jessica Alba, Travis Fimmel, Ian Somerhalder, and Orlando Bloom. “Celebrity number six,” though — so named because that’s the number arbitrarily given to the image in the original thread — took years. 

During that time, there have been hundreds of guesses, and at least two different celebrities — one male and one female — who believed the image was based on them. There were so many plausible guesses that a subreddit, with over 40,000 users, was created to manage the search for Celebrity Number Six, and within that community there was a rule: no matter how promising a lead, the search isn’t over until we have the actual, original photo.

Over the last few years, the mystery has garnered a lot of coverage, ranging from YouTube videos by Justin Whang to mainstream outlets like Distractify and The Daily Mail. The Distractify story, sourced from a viral Tiktok, actually ran just two weeks ago. 

After Sardá’s name came up as a suspect the other day, the photo itself came soon after. A user named Stefan Morse had suggested the model as a candidate, and that had led investigators to find Leandre Escandell, a photographer who quickly identified the photo as his own from an issue of a Spanish magazine. While the original cover for the magazine — Woman #162 — does not appear to have resurfaced online yet, the photo as provided by the man who took it is enough evidence for most investigators to call the case solved.

The fabric had been produced by Latky Mraz, a company operating within the Czech Republic, and it appears that the photos (or at least Escandell’s) were used without permission. That made it difficult for investigators to get answers, as Latky Mraz did not appear to know where they had come from. The company briefly commented saying that they had come from a particular magazine (this proved false, and never actually lined up with the production timeline of the fabric anyway).

Since it’s 2024, there were immediately skeptics on the Celebrity Number Six subreddit, claiming that the Escandell image was generated by artificial intelligence. The general consensus of the hundreds of commenters so far is that there’s no validity to that charge.