My experience is less than 5 examples but seems every time I submit a toned coin that’s been in a folder/coin book for 60 years it comes back QC.
Yup... As an old guy that collected in the 60's I will wholeheartedly agree with the fellers above. I still prefer my coins blast white.
The TPGs don't like that combination of blue and burnt orange or violet on modern coins. On older coins it is an indicator of a dipping and secondary toning (see below). On moderns, they assume that heat was involved.
I don’t like toners myself, thanks for the clues to the QC. I’m bored from the lockdown and just sent in a few.
Good information. As someone who used to buy "original" stuff, I see nothing wrong with the OP's toning. I have many similar coins in old collections. If I saw it, I would not think it was AT unless it was on a coin without luster. That is a silver coin with tons of luster, IMHO that toning can occur naturally. Edit: Just to share the environment I am referring to, I have seen such toning as the OPs coin time and again. Heck, I think I still have a couple of rolls of 62-64 quarters that look like that. They were always very fresh silver, (fully lustrous, BU silver coins), put away in Iowa without humidity protection and in a cardboard rich environment. The same environment RUINED tons of coins next to them, but for some reason the BU 60's silver quarters toned this way. Like I said, if this was an AU coin or anything other than thick lusterous silver BU coins I would agree with AT suspicion. Maybe the TPGs know that, and simply want to not certify any that look like this, throwing the babies out with the bathwater rather than risking some true AT slipping through the cracks.
Not really people then did not like tarnished coins and with good reason. Shops would even dip Unc rolls for customers. AT is more of a recent gimmick. I think a lot of the tide driving the toning craze was a marketing push by rich big gun dealers buried in the stuff (toned coins many looking like run over on the street) which was not selling. Hence the term original was invented. Toning gets darker over time.....Tarnish is a dirty word to them but most of market prefers coins that are brilliant / white. Some toned coins have exceptional eye appeal and their own market. Pricing is subjective so watch out. There is nothing really original about a tarnished coin which has decades of atmospheric exposure lol.
In the 60's, as I recall, "toning" was a word that wasn't even defined. All silver coins needed to be bright to be desirable.
I readily agree that it's more common in the last 15 years, and far more common today than it was 15 years ago. But I first saw it done almost 40 years ago. And if it was being done then, rather obviously it was being done before then. Many collectors seem to think that the things we see today are fairly recent, but pretty much anything there is was being done long before any of us were born. Take dipping coins for example, dipping coins to remove toning has been around for well over 200 years - that's documented. And I suspect it was around long before that.
Artificial toning was originally a coin doctor's method of hiding flaws such as marks, hairlines, old cleanings. It was done mostly to improve the overall grade of the coin. It wasn't until the late 90's that people started paying huge premiums for rainbow toned coins and the coin doctors started to attempt to replicate rainbow toning in order to generate a toning premium for exceptional eye appeal. At that point, the original method of artificial toning became known as Type1 AT and ATing coins for a toning premium took the moniker Type2 AT.