Her statue has welcomed millions of people to New York for 125 years but Lady Liberty has found herself usurped by an imposter on a US postage stamp meant to honour the iconic landmark.
Officials of the US Post Office failed to realise the photo of the Statue of Liberty used on the first-class stamp was of a fiberglass and Styrofoam replica at a gambling casino in Las Vegas.
Postal Service spokesman Roy Betts said three billion stamps have been printed, and they will not be pulled from the market. The 44c forever stamp has been on sale since December and is to be released in booklet form.
"We certainly regret having made the error," said Betts.
Linn's Stamp News, a weekly magazine for stamp collectors, noticed that the stamp shows a rectangular patch on the crown of the statue not found on the original in New York Harbour.
The eyes, eyelids and eyebrows on the replica appeared more sharply defined than on the original statue, and the hair was different, the magazine also noted.
The USPS said it will correct the catalog information for the stamp but has no plans to issue a recall. "Our track record is excellent for this as far as we're concerned," Betts said. "We've been issuing stamps since 1847. Very few errors have occurred over the years."
The real Statue of Liberty, which stands 305ft (93m) tall on Liberty Island off the tip of Manhattan, has appeared on more than 20 stamps previously. The half-sized replica stands outside the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
MGM Resorts International, which owns the hotel, is pleased with the mix-up. "We all thought that the Post Office was honoring just one great American institution, but in reality it was honoring two – the Statue of Liberty and Las Vegas – with just one stamp," a spokeswoman for the company said. "Regardless of how it came about, New York-New York is honored to be the first Las Vegas casino resort to be on a US stamp."