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Nearly 600,000 scratch-and-sniff postage stamps created to celebrate the artisan baguette have gone on sale in France.

Costing €1.96, the stamp issued by La Poste went on sale on Friday and depicts a baguette decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon.

According to the Parisian stationery shop Le Carré d’encre, the stamp has a “bakery scent”.

Ink used on the stamps contains microcapsules which provide the fragrance, Le Carré d’encre said.

The stamps were released for sale on Friday, after a launch on Thursday, the day of Saint-Honoré, the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs.

“The baguette, the bread of our daily lives, the symbol of our gastronomy, the jewel of our culture,” La Poste says on its website.

Damien Lavaud, a printer at Philaposte, described the challenges of working with scented ink to French media.

“This scent is encapsulated. We buy it from another manufacturer,” he said.

“And 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.”

The French baguette was given Unesco heritage status in 2022.