Who Is Celebrity Number Six And Why Are People So Excited About Finding Her? The Reddit Mystery Explained

A long-standing internet mystery appears to have been solved this week, with two Redditors claiming that they have found an unnamed woman people have been looking for since 2020. The story began when Redditor /u/TontsaH posted a photo of their curtains, which had stenciled images of several popular celebrities.

The Redditor asked for help in identifying all the people featured on the scrap of fabric, but months after most of the actors and models were found, no one was able to identify Celebrity Number Six.

This past week, two Redditors joined forces and used AI-assisted facial recognition software to finally find the woman most people only knew as Celebrity Number Six. Here's how the story unfolded.

Where Did The Mystery Of 'Celebrity Number 6' Begin?

Right before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Redditor /u/TontsaH made a post to /r/tipofmytongue showing off a piece of fabric he has been using as a curtain. The fabric had stencil-style headshots of different celebrities, some of who were instantly recognizable and some who weren't. In the post, /u/TontsaH asked the subreddit for help identifying everyone on the fabric, a total of eight people.

Redditors responded to TontsaH's post by identifying seven out of the eight people on the fabric, including Ian Somerhalder and Adrianna Lima. But a sixth figure on the fabric still eluded the Redditors; a beautiful cat-eyed woman dressed in a a jacket with her hair swept back. The Amateur detectives went to other subreddits like /r/Movies for help from celebrity experts and even created a subreddit dedicated to hunting the woman down. People invested in the mystery of Celebrity Number six now had a home; /r/CelebrityNumberSix.

Who Were The Other Celebrities On /u/TontsaH's Curtain?

The identified celebrities on the sheet included supermodel Adrianna Lima (who made two appearances on the curtain), Josh Holloway, Jessica Alba, Travis Fimmel, Ian Somerhalder, and Orlando Bloom. The photos of Lima come from a 1999 XOXO photoshoot and the 2004 Victoria's Secret Angels Across America Tour, the image of Holloway comes from the 2004 GQ "Men of the Year" event, the photo of Alba comes from the 2007 Teen Choice Awards, the picture of Fimmel comes from the 2003 WB Upfront, the one of Sommerholder comes from a 2005 ABC press party and the image of Bloom comes from Japanese magazine Kinema Junpo.

How Did The Mystery of Celebrity Number 6 Spread Online?

Redditor /u/TontsaH continued to investigate the identity of the mystery woman, making another post to /r/tipofmytongue and continuing to be involved with the subreddit dedicated to his cause in early 2021. Later that year, YouTuber Justin Whang posted a video about the mystery, digging through all the available evidence about the woman.

By June 2024, the search for the woman had only intensified, with users on /r/CelebrityNumberSix creating a megathread of all the most important information about the hunt.

Has The Mystery Of Celebrity Number Six Been Solved?

In early September 2024, Redditor /u/IndigoRoom posted an image of Spanish model Leticia Sardá to /r/CelebrityNumberSix, announcing that the mystery woman had been found. The post blew up, gathering over 50,000 upvotes in the first day.

In a comment, the OP explains how they found the original photograph by reaching out to the photographer, writing:

The person depicted in the picture is the spanish model Leticia Sardá. A few days ago, I got in touch with the photographer Leandre Escorsell asking if he knew something about the image. I asked him because he took the photograph that served as a cover of the supplement of Woman Nº162 spanish magazine that features Leticia. He claimed that he recognised the photo and sent me the picture.

But /u/IndigoRoom didn't work alone, his search was a collaboration between him and /u/StefanMorse, who found Leticia Sardá by running a version of the fabric profile through Pimeyes, an AI facial recognition software. In an AMA hosted by /u/StefanMorse, he explained exactly how he found the model.

I'm still in disbelief that it got found and so happy, when I found leticia for the first time my jaw dropped by the uncanny similarity that I couldn't send anyone the lead of leticia sarda for a month and a half just cause of how shocked and insane it was that I thought no one would've believed me 😭 and now cut to today where it's literally been found hopefully and I'm just in awe by it.

The way I found her is not by going through a magazine or anything of that sort, I simply grabbed the six images and edited them to oblivion without using any AI or anything cause fellow researchers, AI legitimately doesn't help with s*** and just slows down the search.

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 that I thought if anyone has done something like this before.

The way I found leticia is exactly by that, I took the results to pimeyes and leticia was the person I got.

I didn't get her one or two time's, I got her like 7 or 8 times and all were different variants of my colored six image.

I think the chances of that happening imo to one specific suspect is just like weirdly uncanny, there had to be something there.

How Did People React To Celebrity Number Six Being Found?

While many people were ecstatic about the simple mystery being solved, other people took the news with more skepticism. One of the /u/IndigoRoom and /u/StefanMorse's primary critics was Redditor /u/HughWattmate9001, an actual moderator of /r/CelebrityNumberSix. He warned that the image could be AI-generated or otherwise faked, and that the subreddit has been burned with hoaxes before.

After much backlash, the moderator decided to step down from his role, still urging people to remain skeptical until someone finds the magazine the photo was supposedly printed in or contacts the photographer themselves.

For the full history of Celebrity Number Six, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.