Scents and sensibility
There are few smells more French than that of a buttery, flaky croissant. That’s probably why France’s postal service, La Poste, started selling stamps in October 2025 infused with the scent of the iconic pastry.
The croissant stamp is the latest in a series of gourmet multisensory postage the country has sent out: in 2024, La Poste released baguette-scented stamps to coincide with the Summer Olympics in Paris. And in February 2025, they issued heart-shaped stamps bearing the fragrant rose, lychee, and raspberry notes of pastry chef Pierre Hermé’s signature Ispahan confection.
France isn’t the first nation to debut fragrance-imbued stamps. That honor, as far as this Newscriptster can tell, goes to Switzerland’s 2001 chocolate stamps. Across the Atlantic, the US debuted scratch-and-sniff ice-pop stamps in 2018.
Scratch and sniff is an offshoot of microencapsulation technology developed in the 1960s for carbonless copy paper. Fragrance molecules are enclosed within polymer bubbles that break open with friction to release scent.
Scent is a powerful medium for tapping into emotions, Michelle Leissner, CEO of the multisensory printing company H&H Graphics, tells Newscripts. That power is something brands—and postal services, apparently—can use to great effect. “You’re engaging different parts of the brain, and marketing messages are more likely to be remembered,” Leissner says.
H&H has created a plethora of scented products for both retail and advertising, including pineapple- and banana-scented wrapping papers for Del Monte Fresh Produce and billboards for Billie deodorant.
Pretty much any scent blend you can imagine can be encapsulated and turned into printable ink, Leissner says. And the fragrance can last a long time in those tiny bubbles—she has a Christmas card that still smells of pine after 15 years. Which means philatelists will presumably be able to enjoy fresh bread smells for years to come.
