Found this in my wheaties by running a magnet over them to pick out the steel cents, but I've never seen one like this before and was wondering if anyone knew why someone would do this? It weighs 3.2 grams and you can see the copper.
Plating coins was a common high school experiment and many companies do it as novelties. Then they get spent.
Forgot another reason - scammers plating 1943 cents in copper, or 1944 cents in zinc/steel/nickel, to try to pass them off as rare wrong planchet errors. I wouldn't expect that for a 1953 though.
There’s also artistic reasons that have no malicious intent. Many coins, especially some Peace Dollars, were polished for jewelry, like a necklace or a belt buckle. The larger coins made more of an impact. But smaller coins, IHC, Barber nickels and mercury dimes were plated with a variety of metals: gold, silver, chrome, nickel…and then used to make rings.
Plenty of available world coins are nickel. They are great donors. Canadian dimes & quarters since 1968. I must have $30 of dimes from CRH. And Swiss for many years.
I used to visit a chrome plating shop in the mid 80's, they used to check the plating process with cents. Nickel plating before chrome plating. There were plated cents laying all over the floor.
Interesting. Because yeah, I was gonna say it looked like that cent in the OP got chromed. I've seen a fair number of 1950s coins (both US and British/Canadian) that got chrome plated for charm bracelets, which were apparently having a moment then. Of course most of those would also have a jewelry loop mounted at the top.
