Stamped out: Royal Mail's plan to shrink Queen Elizabeth's head

As King Charles’s stamps begin landing on our doormats more frequently, we’ll be saying goodbye to the familiar Arnold Machin silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II that has appeared on our envelopes for 55 years. But what is less familiar is the story of how that silhouette almost changed dramatically two decades ago.

Early in this millennium, the Royal Mail’s design director, Barry Robinson, led a secret initiative to design a new set of ‘definitive’ stamps – the everyday 1st and 2nd class ones. The aim was to make it easier for visually impaired or partially sighted people to see the class of stamp by making the ‘1’ or ‘2’ much larger. The only way to do this? Shrinking the Queen’s head.

The design reduced the size of the Queen’s head significantly and also reversed the direction she was facing, having her looking to the right rather than the left

Robinson’s new design fundamentally changed the way the monarch had been depicted on stamps ever since the introduction of the Penny Black.