You can send mail from France with a stamp that smells like a baguette
If you live in France or are traveling there for vacation, you can now mail your friends an authentic French fragrance overseas. The country has revealed a new baguette stamp that smells like a bakery.
The stamp costs $2.13 U.S. dollars and can be used on international letters. It features a drawing of a baguette that smells as good as it looks – because it's a scratch-and-sniff sticker.
The classic French bread loaf "embodies a ritual, that of going to your bakery, a local business anchored in the regions, attracting twelve million consumers every day," France's postal service La Poste said.
"The making of six billion baguettes each year confirms its iconic status in French food heritage," La Poste said.
Paris-based stationery shop Le Carré d'encre sells the stamps, which Stéphane Humbert-Basset designed. There are only 594,000 copies on the market, and they can also be purchased at post offices and other locations that sell stamps in France.
Baguettes are a big part of French culture. In fact, UNESCO, the UN branch that promotes world peace through arts and culture, included baguettes on its "Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity" in 2022.
"The baguette is the most popular kind of bread enjoyed and consumed in France throughout the year," according to UNESCO.
Baguettes only take four ingredients to make – flour, water, salt, and leaven or yeast – but the loaves have generated "modes of consumption and social practices that differentiate them from other types of bread," like daily trips to the bakery.