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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John Burgess, post: 8156552, member: 105098&quot;]There&#039;s a right way and a wrong way to do anything. There is a way to clean a coin without damaging the surfaces, but there are many ways to do it and damage it forever. Unfortunately due to the &quot;never clean coins&quot; stigma, and the fact that it&#039;s trial and error for anyone learning, it&#039;s an underground practice with the exception of conservation services that are in fact &quot;cleaning coins&quot;, just for a price and with better PR about what they are doing.... &quot;oh we aren&#039;t cleaning, we&#039;re experts and we are conserving, it&#039;s different!&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyways. All dealers will dip coins and all dealers will clean coins if it will benefit the sale price of what they bought. Done right it won&#039;t damage anything and it won&#039;t make it a &quot;cleaned coin&quot;. Done wrong or an unexpected&nbsp; result from doing it will cost them also though. </p><p><br /></p><p>The &quot;don&#039;t clean coins&quot; was meant to stop novices that don&#039;t know what they are doing from damaging valuable coins. It&#039;s been turned into a deviant behavior almost though, what has hurt the hobby in the long run, so many coins could benefit from conservation, darkly toned and corroding away, and the owners not cleaning coins thinking it will hurt their resale because that&#039;s what they were told and they don&#039;t want to lose value, while losing value anyways.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m not saying you have to be a professional to &quot;conserve&quot; coins but it takes knowledge and practice, and even then things can go sideways and you get a bad result. </p><p>On the other hand polishing a coin will make it shiny and bright and reflective and &quot;nice&quot; but the surfaces are unnatural. A person needs to at least understand this difference before even thinking about &quot;cleaning&quot; a coin.</p><p>I use quote here mostly to show the word(s) as a term and that its subjective, not objective.</p><p><br /></p><p>But to recap, &quot;don&#039;t clean coins&quot; was meant to protect coins from novices that don&#039;t know what they are doing from destroying a coin. It&#039;s become the be all end all mantra, and driven true coin conservation underground....[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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