Of course, France made a scratch-and-sniff stamp that smells like a baguette

Leave it to the French to find a way to pack the aroma of a freshly baked baguette into a postage stamp. La Poste, the French postal service, is out with scratch-and-sniff stamps of their best-known bread with art from Paris-based artist Stéphane Humbert-Basset . The stamps depict a baguette wrapped in a blue, white, and red ribbon and the text “La baguette, de pain française,” for “The baguette, the French bread.”



The “bakery” scent is made using microcapsules, according to the Le Carré d’encre, a Paris stationary shop. “The difficulty for us is to apply this ink without breaking the capsules, so that the smell can then be released by the customer rubbing on the stamp,” printer Damien Lavaud told the BBC .



[Photo: stephanehumbertbasset /Instagram]



With about two months to go before the opening of the Paris Games , the scented stamp was released on the Feast Day of St. Honoré, the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. Nearly 600,000 stamps were printed.



The “ artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread ” was added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (Unesco) list of intangible cultural heritage in 2022. In France, six billion baguettes are made annually, according to La Poste.



The U.S. doesn’t have food on the Unesco list (what, no love for ballpark hot dogs or the Big Mac?), but that hasn’t stopped the U.S. Postal Service from developing its own scratch-and-sniff stamps. In 2018, the Postal Service put out scented “Frozen Treats” stamps depicting watercolor illustrations of ice pops by Santa Monica, California-based artist Margaret Berg.