Can someone grade for me...

Post pics and ask questions first - then buy, or don't :secret: It's a lot cheaper

 

You can't always, but many times you can - it just takes experience. Take the coin in this thread - see how clean the surface looks in the smooth areas ? Do you also notice that the coin shows a lot of wear ?

Now ask yourself - if the coin is 150 yrs old and has a lot of wear, meaning it has been heavily circulated - is it likely that the fields will be clean ?

Now look at the protected areas like in the denticles, around the letters, in the fine crevices of the devices - see how dark those areas are ? That's dirt accumulated over the years from circulation - it's quite normal.

So what happened to the dirt that should be on the fields ? Answer - it was cleaned off.

Look at your pocket change or go through a loose change jar - check the coins for dirt. After looking at a bunch you'll begin to see how the dirt is worn off the high points by the change being carried in your pocket or a purse - or even from rubbing against other coins in a cash register. But the dirt will largely remain on the smooth fields of the coin because they are low points. And it will accumulate in the small protected areas - they will be the dirtiest.

You'll soon learn how much dirt should be on a coin and in what areas. Then when you go to buy a coin and it doesn't look like what you've come to expect - most of the time that's enough. But you should look at it closer and see if there are other signs of cleaning as well.

 

Thanks for the compliments But there's a bit more to it than that. That is just one way of recognizing a cleaned coin. And it can be confusing as well. For many times a person can look at a coin and see the darkness around the protected areas and not in the fields - and wrongly assume the coin has been cleaned.

In a way it depends on the coin itself - how big it is. Small coins have less surface area in the fields and the fields are more protected because the higher points of the devices are closer together. This means the fields are less likely to be touched or rubbed by casual contact. Therefore more dirt may remain on the fields.

But with larger coins, like a half or a dollar - the distance between one device and next is much larger and the fields are more likely to come into contact with other objects during circulation. This means there will be less dirt on the fields because it is rubbed off to a degree by casual conatct. And then of course you have to take into account the coin's design, how busy it is or how plain - this can have a strong bearing on how much dirt remains too.

So if you look at circulated coin and are uncertain as to whether it may have been cleaned or not based on the dirt - then you have to look for other things. For example - you look for fine hairline scratches that are symmetrical over the surface of the coin or even just one particular area. These scratches will rarely appear on a coin from circulation because the circulation itself wears these fine scratches down smooth - and they are not visible. But with a coin taken from circulation that has been cleaned - the scratches remain because there is nothing to wear them off any longer.

And you have to consider just how circulated the coin is. For even a coin in circulation will retain a certain amount of its luster - if it's not too circulated. It might show some dirt in the protected areas and yet still be AU or XF - and have a large proportion of its luster intact - even under the dirt.

So you see, there is much to consider when trying to recognize a cleaned coin by sight. And I haven't even covered it all.