I personally don't like them. 99% of the time, they are dipped, meaning they are stripped of the history that accompanies them. I love them with natural toning, even dark even toning in nice. Notice how I said dark even. Dark splotchy = turnaway.
It's one of those tricky subjects where most people will prefer originality now days, but years ago it was common practice to dip most everything. A blast white coin is easier to grade, "newer" looking and when you are trying to build a Date & MM set....you kind'a want them to look similar. Toners may fall out of favor one of these days in the distant future too, but given what we know about how acids remove the top layer of surface, mute luster over time & can cause rapid retoning with more yellow-ish colors, I don't reckon people will jump back on the blast-white train for a while. My vote, well, I actually like blast white classics...If the dip was done right and strong luster is still present. And of course when it comes to conservation and removing ugly splotchy toning, dipping is totally fine by me.
If forced to guess - and a baseless guess it would be - I'd think perhaps 25% of Mint State issues aside Morgans, and maybe half of Morgans (kept buried in bags for decades) have survived untouched in the blast white we see today. The older the issue, the less likely - I'm considering Franklins and Mercs/silver Roosies in that 25% as having skewed the percentage upward. And yes, I very much like them.
Mines a coin to coin basis for me. I generally prefer toned but there are blast white coins I like that I will buy.
As close to the original mint issued skin as possible for me without toning. If I can tell its been dipped I pass.
As close to the original mint issued skin as possible for me WITH toning. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
It depends upon the series and sometimes also on the specific coin. A recent prior post here stated they prefer coins the way it should be expected they would look. I agree with this opinion as a general conclusion. I do own "old" coins (early and mid-18th century) which are blast white that still look attractive, but I don't know whether other collectors would find them appealing or not. I presume they have been dipped but there isn't any obvious evidence of it that I can see, as they retain what looks to be most (though maybe not all) of the original luster and I don't see hairlines either. For 20th century series like Mercury dimes and WLH, I don't believe the coins are old enough where their default natural look should be toned or darkly toned. There was a large collector base around to preserve them and many have been saved in rolls. Though vastly scarcer, I hold the same opinion for the South Africa KGV (1923-1936) series where it's apparent many have been cleaned and straight graded, but not all of them. Lastly, for the purist of "original skin", eliminating any coin which cannot conform to this narrow criteria will really limit what you can collect. Most of the coins I collect are not available either at all or if so, nowhere near the same number as US coins. If I insisted on this look, I would have to collect something else.
Being that tpg's and airtite holders are only a recent addition to the hobby. I would look past any coin that old, If it didn't have at least some color to it.
What you'd like to have, and what you can have, are often two different things. Blast white or toned ? It's not really that simple for there are many, many degrees of toning. What a whole lot of people would call blast white coins, are in actuality toned coins. And what a whole lot of people would call toned coins or original coins are in actuality coins that have been dipped. And often more than once, and then re-toned. So when it comes down to it about all you can go by is whether you like the coin you are looking at - or not.
Maybe this is a big deal for modern coin collectors, but as an ancient coin collector it really doesn't mater to me as all ancient coins have been cleaned at least once, and most probably multiple times in the centuries after they were dug up from their earthly graves where they lay for over 1,500 years undergoing all sort of chemical reactions with the soil. When they are first found they look like this! I don't care how much of a purist you are, you'd have to agree that a clump of 500+ coins stuck together in a ball of corrosion, soil, and mud is not fit for display/collection purposes, so they have to be cleaned as in most cases you can't even tell what you have at all with all the stuff stuck to each individual coin. However, I do like coins that have not been cleaned in decades/centuries after their original cleaning from being dug up in the ground...and have acquired toning since then. For example, after this coin was dug up probably in the 18th or 19th century, and then cleaned to get rid of the centuries worth of dirt and corrosion, I bet it was really shinny when the cleaning was completed. But it probably hasn't been cleaned now in at least a century. I think it looks better toned up now, but the fact remains that this is a cleaned ancient coin, which would have been cleaned at least once (after discovery) if not several more times after that. M. Cipius M.f. 115-114 B.C. AR Denarius 16mm. 3.90g. Rome Mint Helmeted head of Roma, r.; X behind. M. CIPI. M. F. Victory in biga, r.; rudder below horses; In ex.: ROMA Crawford 289/1; RSC Cipia 1 And not being a hypocrite, if I'm willing to accept the cleaned ancient coin above, then I have to also accept the cleaned ancient coin below. It probably had a more recent cleaning sometime in the last decade or two at the hands of a dealer looking to get a few more bucks by getting rid of the toning, back when toning was not in fashion. Not as many people cared for toning back in the 90's, believe it or not! LL. Thorius Balbus, 105 BC. AR Denarius (3.91 gm). Head of Juno Lanuria wearing goat skin headress / Bull charging right. Thoria.1. If I really want to get rid of the shinny, I can just stick it in a paper envelope for the next 3-5 years. It won't quite look like that first coin which has not been cleaned in at least a century, but it may end up looking fairly close to what the one below looks like, which will will at least give it a little more character. Vespasian, AD 69-79 AR denarius, 3.4g, 19mm, 6h; Rome mint, c. 76. Obv.: IMP CAESAR VESPASIANVS AVG; Laureate head right. Rev.: IOVIS CVSTOS; Jupiter standing left, sacrificing from patera over altar and holding sceptre. Reference: RIC 849 But either way, the point still remains, regardless of whether you want a shinny coin or a toned coin, you are still going to have to accept and get used to buying cleaned coins if you collect ancients. I don't think cleaning made any of these coins less "original" or less interesting. I'm sure almost all ancient coin collectors would probably agree with that too. But then again, I don't collect modern coins. if I did, I'm sure I would be very obsessed about originality like the OP, as these coins didn't spend more than a millennia buried in the ground like my ancients.
