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Celebrity Number Six (sometimes abbreviated C6) is the name given to a previously unidentified face on a fabric print, the subject of a years-long online search.

In 2020, Redditor (Reddit user) TontsaH posted to the subreddit r/TipOfMyTongue asking for help in identifying eight faces depicted on a set of curtains. While seven were quickly identified as actors and models prominent in the mid-2000s, one – the sixth, as numbered by TontsaH – proved far more difficult to identify, leading to the creation of a dedicated subreddit, r/CelebrityNumberSix. Members of r/CelebrityNumberSix pursued hundreds of ultimately fruitless leads for four years, including contacting the fabric's supplier, reviewing a decade's worth of photos on Getty Images taken by the photographers of the other seven images, and various forms of image manipulation and reverse image searching. In 2024, Redditor StefanMorse identified Spanish model Leticia Sardá as a likely candidate by running a colored-in version of the print through the facial recognition tool PimEyes. On 8 September, user IndigoRoom posted the original photo, taken by Leandre Escorsell in 2006; IndigoRoom had contacted Escorsell because he was known to have photographed Sardá. The successful identification was one of several "lost media" mysteries solved in 2024, including the origins of the song "Ulterior Motives", and the original Backrooms image.

Seven were quickly identified as Josh Holloway, Jessica Alba, Travis Fimmel, Ian Somerhalder, Orlando Bloom, and Adriana Lima (twice), but one of the faces, dubbed Celebrity Number Six, could not be identified. However, users struggled to pin down the missing face or its reference photo – even the gender of Celebrity Number Six was not agreed on by users, although female seemed more plausible to them. The COVID-19 pandemic began shortly thereafter; Candice Lim of Slate characterizes the Celebrity Number Six as a "light" in the "dark place" of the Internet in the following years. As efforts progressed to identify Celebrity Number Six, people were able to replicate the process used to turn the photographs into monochrome, and then attempted to reverse that process. Reddit user StefanMorse colored in the Celebrity Number Six image to resemble a photograph and ran it through PimEyes, a facial recognition tool. On 8 September, IndigoRoom posted "Celebrity Number Six has been found" to r/CelebrityNumberSix, showing a copy of the photo provided by Escorsell. As of her identification as Celebrity Number Six, she was working as a waitress at a café, living, in her words, "a quiet life with my children, my little house, my little job", far removed from her past as a model.

After Celebrity Number Six was identified, people from similar communities began posting to the subreddit, looking for help with their own investigations. Solving "esoteric, low-stakes myster" like Celebrity Number Six has become, according to journalist Caitlin Dewey, "something of a participant sport" on social media, like "catnip for a certain type of Reddit user". Lim theorized that this mystery in particular was attractive to Redditors because if Celebrity Number Six really was famous, identifying them would have restored the memory of that person the public consciousness, and Redditors could empathize with not wanting to be forgotten or lost. Luther said that solutions to mysteries like Celebrity Number Six are "being done in a way that wouldn't have been possible even a few years ago". Koebler also remarked on the use of traditional journalistic methods, with Celebrity Number Six ultimately being found "with a combination of AI facial recognition software and one photographer's long memory". Club called mysteries like Celebrity Number Six "one of the last great bastions of the early days of the internet", but speculated that they would become less common in time "as the world moves further away from not just physical media but reality itself", citing the use of AI-generated images in ads for the film Civil War and in the documentary What Jennifer Did.

Quick Facts

• After Celebrity Number Six was identified, people from similar communities began posting to the subreddit, looking for help with their own investigations.
• On 8 September, IndigoRoom posted "Celebrity Number Six has been found" to r/CelebrityNumberSix, showing a copy of the photo provided by Escorsell.
• Reddit user StefanMorse colored in the Celebrity Number Six image to resemble a photograph and ran it through PimEyes, a facial recognition tool.
• On 8 September, user IndigoRoom posted the original photo, taken by Leandre Escorsell in 2006; IndigoRoom had contacted Escorsell because he was known to have photographed Sardá.
• Seven were quickly identified as Josh Holloway, Jessica Alba, Travis Fimmel, Ian Somerhalder, Orlando Bloom, and Adriana Lima (twice), but one of the faces, dubbed Celebrity Number Six, could not be identified.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Celebrity Number Six". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.