i've seen a lot of coins come through the bank that are discolored, stained, abused, or have an otherwise different coloring to them than normal. my question is, how does one tell when the coloration is the result of the toning that occurs (naturally?) and when the coloration is the result of human interaction? is there one type of coloration, or can there be many different contributing factors? is there such thing as too much tone on a coin? what prompted me to ask this question is the following coin. this 71D half appears (to me anyways) to have suffered some environmental damage to change the color to the deep reddish-brown. but i see people talking about these "chocolatey" tones and whatnot, and i'm just not sure. what do you think? the coin doesn't appear to be damaged other than the expected circulation wear.
I won't say for sure, but there are others with much more knowledge than me - but it looks like a guess a times. No way to know for sure if the toning is natural. Too me the toning floats on the luster - how I heard it described once. I know on high grade buffalo's I like a slight purple-ish color in the luster, or a light golden color. For the Kennedy you have shown it lost like something got on the surface to cause the look. I know finding change in a gas station parking lot you get a lot of weird looking colors from the various denominations - yes I am one that will walk around and pick up change. Including pennies - yes I said it. Too me sometimes it is easy to tell artifical toning since it looks like it is baked or burnt on the surface of the coin. Just my opinion.
that's kinda what i was thinking about that half. the tone is fairly consistent across the entire surface of the coin except the kennedy bust. even the reeds are evenly toned. it almost looks like someone attacked it with an orange highlighter. in the more beautiful examples of toning i've seen, there's less consistency to it. i see several hues and shades swirling together, sort of like a drop of oil on the surface of a water puddle. but if you search for images of toned coins, the spectrum of results makes you wonder just where does the line fall between natural toning and a coin that gets a little help.
When I used to search $500 boxes of half dollars, I would see many from the 70's with similar coloration. I even held on to a few, but it got to the point that I'd see so many that I stopped saving them. I don't think they're AT. Chris
exactly. that's the other thing about these, is that there are so many of them out there. in the $20 of halves i rolled at the bank today, there were 3 or 4 with full toning, and several more with other colorations over a good portion of the surface. so even if it is something that's natural, it's really not that unusual or unique. to me, that says it would have to be a natural process, because why artificially do this to a coin if it's already so common in the wild?
