Reddit solves years-long mystery behind Celebrity Number Six photo
A curtain print became an internet obsession when Reddit spent four years chasing one face. The answer led to Leticia Sardá, a 2006 photo shoot, and a copyright dispute.
A curtain print in a Finnish home turned into one of the internet’s strangest visual riddles, and the answer only emerged after years of community detective work. What looked like a simple decorative fabric became “Celebrity Number Six,” the lone face on a set of curtains that resisted identification while seven others were named quickly.
The mystery began on January 27, 2020, when Finnish Reddit user TontsaH posted to r/TipOfMyTongue asking for help identifying the eight faces printed on the curtains. Seven were recognized fast, but the remaining portrait sent users down a long trail of guesses, archive searches and image analysis. The search soon outgrew the original thread and moved into a dedicated subreddit, r/CelebrityNumberSix, where the hunt became a shared obsession.
That obsession was powered by a very photography-specific toolset. One Redditor reportedly combed Getty Images archives from 1998 to 2007, hoping to find the source image hiding behind the low-quality reproduction. Others tested reverse-image searches and compared clothing, hair and facial structure against magazine spreads and celebrity archives. The breakthrough came when StefanMorse used PimEyes on a colorized version of the image and got a match to Spanish former model Leticia Sardá. The original photograph was traced to Spanish photographer Leandre Escorsell, who shot Sardá in 2006 for a Woman magazine session.
The identification solved the face, but it also exposed another layer of the story: how far an image can travel once it leaves its original context. EL PAÍS reported that the fabric was sold by a Czech company, and that about 50,000 people were following the search at its peak. Sardá, who told EL PAÍS she lived quietly in Tenerife, worked in a café and was raising two children, suddenly found her face circulating across Instagram, TikTok and news feeds after years out of the modeling world.
There was skepticism too. Wikipedia notes that some users initially suspected the reveal was a generative-AI hoax, a reminder that even a solved photo mystery now passes through the filter of digital distrust. PetaPixel and Boing Boing framed the case as a four-year curtain mystery that Reddit finally cracked, but the deeper lesson sits in the image itself: a blurry printed face, copied and recopied, can send an entire community into the archive and back again before anyone is sure what they are looking at.
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