In search of ‘Celebrity Number 6’: How the internet went crazy for Leticia Sardá, a former Spanish model

“I was wondering if you could help me with this picture,” a young Croatian man wrote on LinkedIn a few days ago to Leticia Sardá, a 43-year-old waitress from Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands. The young man wanted to know if an old photo of her face was really her. “Thank you for helping me with this internet mystery,” the message concluded.

Sardá was surprised, but she answered without worrying too much about it: yes, she said, it’s me. He also asked her for the original image, which Sardá still kept. In the young man’s email response, it became clear that Sardá did not fully understand the magnitude of what was going to happen: “Are you aware that there are about 50,000 people who have been looking for you for five years?”

The story begins because Sardá’s face, taken from a photo shoot for Woman magazine in 2006, ended up printed on a piece of fabric sold by a Czech company. There was her face next to that of celebrities such as Adriana Lima, Orlando Bloom and Brad Pitt. A buyer, who was also a user of Reddit, had identified all the faces except for one, whom he called Celebrity Number 6. Five years ago, a community emerged on Reddit obsessed with finding her identity, a mission that spread to the social platform Discord and other apps. Last week, all the collective effort was rewarded: they finally located her, and Sardá became the unwitting star of viral videos and photos on Instagram, TikTok and dozens of articles in the media.

“I never thought the internet was so big,” Sardá told EL PAÍS over the phone from Tenerife. The storm has caught her off guard: “I lead a quiet life with my children, my little house, my little job. I don’t think I’ve worn heels for 10 years. I’m a beach girl, with cropped trousers, I don’t wear make-up, I don’t comb my hair.” At 16, she left the island to work as a model in Milan and other cities: “I never had a normal adolescence.” In 2009 she quit that career to return home, and today she is a separated mother of two who works in a café.

The whirlwind that turned her into the new internet celebrity for a few days altered her routine. When local media published the news, people started to stop her on the street, she says. Her chats with parents at school and soccer games were disrupted. “I’m not used to receiving so much attention. That’s a bit complicated for me. You have to tell your life story and I don’t like to do that, I’m very discreet, I don’t talk about what I did 25 years ago, I don’t introduce myself and say ‘hello, I’m a model.”

Now Sardá has opened accounts on Instagram, TikTok and Reddit. The moderators of the Reddit community, which already has more than 60,000 people, showed their gratitude by opening up a request for her on Gofundme, where she has raised €2,200 and has started selling prints of the original photo taken 18 years ago. She has sold more than 30 so far. Now Sardá will also go on TV to talk about it. And if all this ends up in suggestions to become a model again, she will think about it.

But how did they find her?

The most fascinating part of the story is how thousands of users on Reddit came across Sardá after a mix of perseverance, artificial intelligence and chance. Internet detectives went to great lengths. They contacted the manufacturer, did reverse image searches (even with the help of artificial intelligence), and searched the internet archives for old sellers of the fabric. They looked at all the photos taken by Getty photographers between 1900 and 2008. One user went so far as to humanize the colors on the face of the Celebrity Number 6, since it seemed obvious that a program, Adobe Illustrator, had been used to create that type of texture on the fabric.

With that image that looked like a photo again, the user ran it through the PimEyes facial recognition software. There were several screenshots of Sardá. None of them was the original photo, but they looked quite similar. This is where two other Spaniards come into play.

“I was accidentally involved in this process,” explains a twenty-something Andalusian Reddit user who goes by the name IndigoRoom, and who prefers to remain anonymous. “It all came together during a lunch break at work,” he says. “I was browsing Reddit on my phone, which I don’t usually do, I only participate sporadically, when I came across the subreddit [the community] that was investigating the search for the image,” he adds. IndigoRoom barely knew about the case of the Celebrity Number 6. He knew that a huge list of candidates with similar factions had been created on the forum. “On the banner there were only images of supermodels and Hollywood actors, so I was surprised to find the Spanish name of a model I had never heard of: Leticia Sardá,” he says.

He Googled the name to see who it was and found the cover of Woman, which vaguely resembled the image on the fabric. Then he found the name of the photographer of that photo shoot, Leandre Escorsell. And he wrote to him. “We are writing to you from an internet forum,” the email began.

What if it's a scam?

Escorsell explains to EL PAÍS that at first he was very careful. “I thought it could be a scam, I didn’t want to click on any links,” he says over the phone. But IndigoRoom’s courtesy and kindness convinced him and he sent them the original photo. Then the inevitable controversy arose: veteran users of the forum accused the unknown IndigoRoom of having created the photo with AI. They insulted him. They wrote to Escorsell to check if he was really the author. These reactions have their reasons. Others had already tried to sneak in and take advantage of the possible benefits of sudden fame: “Over the years, this mystery has been acquiring an increasingly larger dimension, although I never imagined it would be so large, and I know that there have been models and actors who have confirmed that they were the ones in the photo, but without being able to provide the original image,” says IndigoRoom. Other users had also tried to generate the image or distort it.

This desire to find the truth beyond all shadow of a doubt, and the incessant and detective-like search for characters, is a common form of entertainment on the internet. Sometimes, as in police cases, the objective is delicate and dubious, but in others it is purely to demonstrate one’s digital skills. Both Sardá and Escorsell highlight the kindness and politeness of Reddit users when they contacted them. But neither of them, who have spoken again after years without doing so, had any idea of what was going to befall them.

IndigoRoom himself, more accustomed to the dynamics of the internet, was also surprised by how far something that started as a silly game could go: “When I got the image and shared it on the forum, I didn’t have the impression that I was doing something that would particularly interest anyone, beyond the fact that 60 or 70 people commented on the post with the original image. But it has gotten millions of views and has generated many articles in mass media, especially in English.” Now he will leave his IndigoRoom account in memory of his feat, like the player who hangs up his boots after scoring in the final of a World Cup.

Sardá sees it as an opportunity, but above all she admits that it is a fun turn of events that life has given her: “At this point, it is something that I did not ask to happen, but it has happened and we are going to enjoy it as much as we can and I will have a few laughs. It is a fantastic story to tell my grandchildren when we make cookies on a Sunday afternoon.”

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