You either love them or hate them. I love them. I started collecting blast white coins at first, then I got my hands on my first toner and the gloves were off. I sold my blast white coins and decided to buy strictly toners where I could for my type set. Toners seem to be the new thing everyone wants and sometimes the prices are through the roof. But if this trend continues won't we see more blast white coins put into situations to make them tone? I went into a coin shop where he had some proof sets and some slabbed silver Eagles that caught my eye when I walked by. I had asked about the toning on the coins in the window and he said none of them were toned. I grabbed one and he said it wasn't toned when he put it there 8 months ago. So if all a person has to do is place the coin in an environment where it will tone, won't the market be filled with toned coins in the not to distant future?
I wish it were that easy. I have had coins on the window sill for years and they havent toned at all.
I conspired to try to tone some AU/UNC Kennedy Halves as a tester by putting old tiny paper envelopes with the sticky side so you could close one coin inside it (forgive my ignorance on their name) inside a tube that had the halves. I put them next to my water heater so they'd get exposed to heat. I left them for several months and... then I forgot about them, moved, and left them sitting there. They're probably back in circulation now
There you go. And I don't pay attention to the silly mind games, either. The TPGs can AT, QT, NT, and we can MA, all we want, not hearing it. If the surface is compromised by the tarnish, that's a serious negative. If it's not, I'm no detective, I collect coins. I'm going to let some mixed-up numbskull talk me off a perfectly good coin because he's imagining its tarnish fits into an arbitrary category nobody can even define in any practical way? Imagine on...
A toned coin can get too dark and hide marks under the toning. Some collectors are forgetting that a "100% original coin" was bright white when it first came off the press.
That was not always so. When I first joined this forum, most members were not big fans of rainbow toning or the price premiums associated with them. After plastering this forum with rainbow toned coins for years, many members joined the toning fan club.
Just based on past history, but there will always be two groups of collectors. the group who prefers toned and the other group who prefers bright coins. I am in the middle of the two groups.
Layers of varying thickness of silver sulfide or copper sulfide via a phenomenon called thin film interference.
While I agree that there will always be the group that prefers untoned coins, many of those in that group have never been introduced to rainbow toned coins and don't even know they exist. That is the primary reason that people used to prefer untoned coins, and why so many toned coins were dipped a few decades ago. Today, those that don't know about toned coins represent the novice collectors who don't peruse internet coin forums. The rainbow toned market expansion is directly linked to two technological advances: the internet and digital photography. Now that showing toned coins is as easy as snapping a photo with your iPhone and uploading it to a internet coin forum, the exposure of rainbow toned coins is widespread. Neither of these factors are going away, therefore there is no reason to think that interest in rainbow toned coins will decline significantly in the future. The biggest threat to the toned coin market is an erosion in the confidence of the TPG's to weed out artificially toned coins. The rainbow toned coin market has been strong and stable for over 15 years. I'm not sure how long it has to stay that way before people will stop calling it a fad.
