Please define "lightly cleaned". The way I define it (to include dipping), I would say well over 75% (neglecting moderns). In general, the older the coin, the more likely it was cleaned.
I hope that newbies are looking at this thread. The "lightly cleaned" thing is sooooo overwhelmingly important to numismatics- people have lost tons of $ on this one thing
I think the cleaning issue gets blown out of proportion. I can understand if a coin was whizzed or cleaned with a brush, or polished. Then it's real obvious and there is serious damage. I don't feel that light cleanings should be frowned upon as much as people do. The reason I feel this way is that we went through centuries of having no standards where just about everything was cleaned up until a few decades ago. Then all of a sudden, cleaning became an unacceptable practice. Now it's too late. Most old stuff has been cleaned. You can't change that now. There's no way for every collector to have all perfect, uncleaned examples because they likely don't exist in enough quantity. Then you wonder what's really changed about the coin. A microscopic layer (film) on the surface was removed? It's still a coin! There may come a time when these facts are accepted again and they lighten up about it. Maybe they already have. MS coins are usually MS, uncleaned coins. AU and less can pretty much look the same whether they've been cleaned or not, if it wasn't a harsh cleaning. So I don't see what the big deal is in many instances. Harshly cleaned is a damaged coin no matter what.
It comes down to a matter of definitions Vess. There is nothing wrong with a coin that has been cleaned - nothing. There is something wrong with a coin that has been harshly cleaned. So when people use a term like "lightly cleaned", not everybody understands that term to mean the same thing. To me, lightly cleaned means that the coin was harshly cleaned, but only lightly. Meaning the damage done to the coin is not so bad. But it is still bad. There are varying degrees of harsh cleaning. Some others think of the term lightly cleaned as meaning that the coin was not harshly cleaned at all or harmed in any way. Like I said, it's a matter of definitions.
