Hello all, I had a quick question about toned coins (specifically rainbow toning). How do you know if a rainbow tone is natural compared to a rainbow tone that is caused artificially through cleaning?
you find this out by looking at thousands and thousands of coins + asking people that know a lot about toning. I have had to learn the hard way on some toned mercury dimes but have kept them to remind me of what artificial toning looks like. over time you will be able to see the difference.
I think you're a bit confused. Toning is not caused by cleaning. Typically, cleaning (which is what dipping is) removes toning from a coin - it doesn't put it on the coin. Your real question is how to tell artificial toning from natural toning. Well, the simple answer is, sometimes you can't and sometimes you can. If artificial toning is done correctly, and much of it is, nobody not even the foremost expert in the world can tell it is artificial toning. But if artificial toning is done incorrectly then yes it can sometimes be identified as such. But getting to the point where you can do that is a matter of experience. And perhaps you have two questions here really with the second being how do you identify a coin that has been harshly cleaned ? That too is a matter of experience because there are many, many, different forms of harsh cleaning and they don't all look the same. Correctly identifying if a coin has been harshly cleaned is one the hardest things there is to learn in this hobby. And it usually requires a great deal of experience. Sometimes even people who have spent their whole lives in the hobby are fooled by it, or miss it.
