“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. The young man wanted to know if an old photo of his face was really hers. “Thank you for helping me with this internet mystery,” the message concluded.
Sardá was surprised, but answered without worrying much: Yes, he said, it’s me.. He also asked him for the original image, which Sardá kept. In the e-mail From the boy’s response, it was 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 looking for you for five years?”
The story begins because Sardá’s face, taken from a photo shoot for the magazine Woman In 2006, she ended up printed on a fabric sold by a Czech company. There was her face next to those of celebrities such as Adriana Lima, Orlando Bloom and Brad Pitt. A buyer, a user of the forum platform Reddit, had identified all the protagonists except one (or one): he called it the “famous number 6” (or celebrity number 6). Five years ago, a community emerged on Reddit obsessed with finding her identity, which spread to Discord and other sites. Last week, the phenomenon was rewarded: they finally found her, and Sardá became the protagonist, without knowing it, 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 have 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 left that career to return home, where today she is a separated mother of two children and 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, they even stopped her in the street, she says. Her chats with parents at school and football 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 do that, I’m very discreet, I don’t tell what I did 25 years ago, I don’t introduce myself and say ‘hello, I’m a model.’”
Now Sardá has opened up Instagram accounts, TikTok and Reddit. The moderators of the Reddit community, which already has more than 60,000 people, opened a page of thanks for the entertainment generated on Gofundme, where 2,200 euros have been raised and has started selling prints of the original photo from 18 years ago. She has sold more than 30 so far. Now she will also go on TV to talk about it. If all this ends up in suggestions for her 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, a mix of perseverance, artificial intelligence and chance. detectives Internet users made all kinds of efforts. They contacted the manufacturer, did reverse image searches (even with the help of artificial intelligence) and searched the Internet archive for old sellers of the fabric or even searched for all the photos by Getty photographers between 1900 and 2008. One user managed to humanize the colors of the face of the famous number 6, as it seemed obvious that a program (Adobe Illustrator) had been used to create that type of texture.
With that image that looked like a photo again, he put it in the software facial recognition software PimEyes. Several screenshots of Sardá were found there. None of them were the original photo, but they looked quite similar. This is where two other Spaniards come into play.
“I am an accidental part of this process,” explains a twenty-something from Andalusia who is the Reddit user IndigoRoom and who prefers to remain anonymous. “It all started during a lunch break at work,” he says. “I was visiting Reddit on my phone, something I don’t usually do, I only participate there sporadically, when I came across the Reddit thread.” subreddit (the community) that was investigating the search for the image,” he adds. IndigoRoom was barely aware of the case of the famous number 6. I knew that the forum had created a huge list of candidates from similar factions. “On the banner there were only pictures of supermodels and Hollywood actors, so I was surprised to find the name of Spanish origin of a model I had never heard of: Leticia Sardá,” she says.
He googled the name to see who it was and came across the cover of the Woman which vaguely resembled the image on the curtain. Then he found the name of the photographer of that session, 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 nerves have their reasons. Others had already tried to sneak in and take advantage of the possible pull 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 doubt, and this incessant and detective-like search for characters, is a common entertainment on the Internet. Sometimes, as in police cases, the objective is delicate and dubious, but in others it is only to demonstrate digital skill. There have been other situations such as the Spanish face of a famous meme or the ultimate goal of a game created on the Internet. Both Sardá and Escorsell highlight the kindness and education of Reddit users when they contacted them. But neither of them, who have spoken again these days after years without doing so, had any idea of what was going to fall on them.
IndigoRoom himself, more accustomed to the dynamics of the Internet, was also surprised by how far something that started as a banal 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 he admits that it is a fun turn of events that life has given him: “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 it takes and I will have a few laughs. It is a fantastic story to tell my grandchildren when we make cookies on a Sunday afternoon.”
