It took an army of internet sleuths to find ‘Celebrity Number Six’
Summary
The solution of an online mystery shows the power of crowdsourcing.
Forty thousand people were searching for a photo he had taken, and Leandre Escorsell had no idea. The Spanish fashion photographer only learned of the hunt for “Celebrity Number Six" from a stranger’s unexpected Sept. 6 email.
For nearly five years, the email explained, thousands of amateur sleuths from around the world had been working to identify a mysterious face in a pop-art collage of celebrity portraits. The pattern had appeared, in three different shades, on fabric sold in Europe in the late 2000s.
Now, after hundreds of debunked theories and false starts, the sleuths believed they had found the sixth face in a Spanish fashion spread Escorsell shot in 2006. “It truly surprised me," Escorsell said in an email—not least of all, because the picture had never appeared online, raising questions about how the sleuths found it.
Increasingly, however, few mysteries lie outside the reach of the internet’s crowdsourced investigators. On platforms including Reddit, TikTok and Discord, solving mysteries—from the momentous to the mundane—has long been something of a participant sport. More recently, these self-styled detectives have adopted a range of AI and facial-recognition tools that have supercharged their investigative powers and allowed them to solve stubborn, long-standing puzzles, including the case of “Number Six."
“It’s being done in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago," said Kurt Luther, the director of Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab, which researches the techniques of online sleuths. “Here, the crowd was able to piece together many different clues over a number of years…and they were able to leverage cutting-edge technology to do so."
The story of Celebrity Number Six began in 2020, when a user on the discussion site Reddit asked for help identifying the faces on a set of printed curtains. He believed his grandmother had sewn them, he wrote, with fabric from the Finnish department store Anttila.
This sort of esoteric, low-stakes mystery is catnip for a certain type of Reddit user. In recent years, thousands of people have also devoted themselves to searching for obscure audio recordings and the origins of viral pictures. Sleuths easily identified seven of the eight celebrity faces on the Finnish curtains, but the final face eluded them—even after they tracked down the fabric’s manufacturer and unearthed old catalogs that featured it.
The breakthrough finally came in early September, when one devoted Number Six searcher colorized the two-dimensional print to make it look more lifelike, then uploaded it to an AI-powered reverse image search tool called PimEyes. PimEyes suggested the photo could depict Leticia Sardá, a 43-year-old Spanish model who retired in 2009. Galvanized by the new lead, other sleuths dug up ad campaigns and fashion shoots that Sardá had appeared in, and began reaching out to the model and associated photographers to see if anyone knew of additional photos that matched the fabric.
Sure enough, Escorsell recognized the stylized face from a photo he had taken of Sardá for a supplement to the magazine Woman. He is unsure how it ended up on the Finnish fabric, he added, because he never licensed it for that purpose.
Sardá, meanwhile, has embraced her new celebrity, launching public accounts on TikTok and Instagram and advertising signed Number Six prints. In a Sept. 15 Q&A on Reddit, Sardá said she was initially shocked by the attention—but is now “having fun" with it.
Incidentally, the sleuths who spent so long searching for Sardá’s image are now also looking for their next move. In the week since Reddit’s Celebrity Number Six forum declared the case closed, members of other investigative communities have flooded it with solicitations for their own pet projects and puzzles.
There’s the search for the origin of a new wave song played on German radio in 1987. The quest to find an actress who appeared, uncredited, in a 1998 André Rieu video. Luther, of Virginia Tech, doesn’t doubt that many of these projects will succeed: Crowdsourced investigations benefit hugely, he said, from both the devotion and the broad knowledge base of their amateur fact-finders. Much of his lab’s current research involves harnessing the power of amateur sleuths for more conventional, expert-led investigations, like solving crimes or conducting historical research.
“Even if this particular question was pretty narrow," he said, of Celebrity Number Six, “I think it speaks to the broader power and capabilities of this way of working together."
Caitlin Dewey is the author of the digital culture newsletter Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends.
