Last summer, USPS customers voted for their favorite stamps issued between 1997 and 2022.
The Postal Service will reissue the winning release — which will remain top secret until May — as part of the organization’s 250th anniversary celebration.
In the run-up to the big reveal at the Boston 2026 World Expo philatelic show, the USPS Stamps Forever website is exploring some of the 25 releases in the contest.
The third installment in the “Stamp Encore Celebration” series shines a light on a few of the innovative printing techniques that USPS used for some of the stamps in the contest:
• Scratch-and-sniff technology was employed for 2018’s Frozen Treats, the first — and so far, only — scratch-and-sniff stamps;
• Metallic foil was used for two releases: 2019’s Transcontinental Railroad, which used gold foil in a nod to the golden spike that marked the railroad’s completion in 1869, and 2020’s Let’s Celebrate, using festive foil in magenta, teal and orange;
• A proprietary, highly reflective rainbow holographic material was used for 2018’s Bioluminescent Life, making the deep-sea creatures on the stamps appear to glow;
• Textured coatings were used for 2017’s Have a Ball! stamps, which mimicked the textures of the balls they depicted; and
• Thermochromic ink was employed for the image on 2017’s Total Eclipse of the Sun. When someone touched the image of the black disk of the moon blocking the sun, the heat would reveal details of the moon’s surface.
Stamps using novel printing techniques “garner a lot of attention, even outside the philatelic world, and they sell really well,” said Bryan Duefrene, senior stamp development specialist for USPS.
But the organization is judicious in its use of such techniques, only applying them where “it makes sense,” he said.
The Stamps Forever website expects to run five installments in its “Stamp Encore Celebration” series — the fifth and final entry will entail in-depth coverage of the winner.
Email us your feedback. Your comments could be included in our “Mail” column.
