I thought I had posted to this yesterday... is it the heavy toning to 80% of the coin that is suspect ? Natural toning would be more uniform in cicularity
The colors and how they look more than anything. You can have good toning on the whole coin or part of it and bad toning on parts or the whole
Hopping on the back of what my colleague is saying, there is a natural progression to the types of colors one sees on a toned coin, and they become easier to spot with more experience. In no instance does this natural progression contain the deep magentas, bright oranges, and light cyan colours that are seen on this coin. The colour pallette of the coin in the original post is textbook artificial toning. Also as a general rule (i.e. this is not always the case), more vibrant toning will usually appear on coins that are in their mint state--without wear, and still retain their full luster. A lot of the beautiful toning patterns you see on coins occurred due to their long-term storage in either bank bags or rolls. If you are interested in diving into the toning rabbit hole, here are some links that are conducive for doing so (there are plenty of others to be found, but these were the ones I had saved): https://www.cointalk.com/threads/can-you-define-artificial-toning.326929/ https://www.cointalk.com/threads/th...artificial-questionable-toning-thread.326881/ https://www.cointalk.com/threads/beware-of-rainbow-toning.261563/ https://www.cointalk.com/threads/question-about-real-and-fake-toned-coins.40555/ http://www.jhonecash.com/research/sunnywood_classification.asp