Rainbow Tone Wheat Pennies - Are they fake?

Must a coin have "MS" cartwheel luster to be considered naturally toned? Most of my coins are old, so I don't have experience in identifying cartwheel luster. Any pointers?

 

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I have little to add to the critics, concerning beautiful rainbow effects. Morgan dollars seem to warrant a premium, due to "cabinet toning". the more colors the better. I have also seen iridiumized mercury dimes advertised full bander MS-70s, when actually none exist!

 

I have little to add to the critics, concerning beautiful rainbow effects. Morgan dollars seem to warrant a premium, due to "cabinet toning". the more colors the better. I have also seen irridium-ized dimes advertized as MS-69s!

 

I agree with leadfoot's posts.

I too would not hesitate to pay a few dollars for each of the three coins posted. I think they are pretty.

 

IMHO a toned coin, AT or NT, is no different from a corroded, altered or otherwise damaged coin. They're no way "as minted" and have no place in my collection. I'll take a nice AU over a toned BU any day.

 

Personally, I don't think toned coins are quite so cut and dried. I have seen both end-of-roll coins as well as natural toned coins from mint-sealed bags that could make it into either list or group shown, although those are great pics. I have also sold or re-sold many hundreds of cent rolls without ever even opening them to view the contents. Sometimes that is the way customers prefer them and if one deals in larger quantities there is never enough time to sit and study individual coins even if the end of roll coin is toned. Also, I collect coins myself and have found, or purchased many coins that are toned simply because I found them attractive and enjoyable to view. If I knew for certain or strongly suspected that a given coin was artificially toned, I would stay away from it, but that is not always easy to ascertain. I try to keep my toned coin collection separate from ordinary set collections, but sometimes they do overlap, and yes I have a lot of both but that is due to the number of years I have been doing this rather than some secret way to make them, and I know there are many real and fake ones offered on-line.

When I began searching for errors and varieties though, I ended up acquiring around a hundred different sealed bags and thousands of individual rolls, comprising over a half million cents that I viewed individually under magnification, over 40+ years. During storefront years, things would often come and go so fast that it would be hard to remember what one bought and sold each day without reviewing sales slips later on. I would never entertain the notion of purposely artificially toning coins because that to me is tantamount to fraud or at least deception for profit. Maybe some day there will be an authoritative means to detect the real ones from the fakes, and maybe the certification companies already have ways of doing this, but in the meantime if a coin appeals to you, collect it and if you find it is fake, spend it or give it away or toss it in a wishing well, or even save it as a comparison coin to review against other possibles, but above all, enjoy your hobby and collections.

I went through all the stages of collecting from a few here and there, to local and national shows, storefront dealing, to investing in them to accumulating to hoarding, etc. I love coins mostly for their history, but also for designs, scarcity, etc. They don't take up much space and seem to endure when properly stored in temperature and humidity controlled areas. There is such a small segment of the overall population that even collects coins, but that is growing and so in the future there will be more demand for much of what I continue to accumulate. Within those who do collect, there often are those who only collect a specific denomination or type or sub-group but even that sometimes expands to other items depending upon one's desires and budget. Sometimes I sell things in order to have funds for other things, but it is not unusual to regret selling some things that I wish I would not have. I have little patience with those who are arrogant at shows and such, because one could walk through a large convention carrying a cardboard box of valuable items and be judged according to the ragged box rather than the contents, most of which nobody knows what is in there. Thieves do the same thing in their judging a target, so it is sort of poor-man's security.

What people collect is their business and I do not judge them for that as long as they enjoy what they are collecting. I can build a case for collecting pristine coins and/or toned coins and believe both are within the scope of numismatics. I can also find it acceptable to collect a few reproductions of items that are so rare that one will never ever be able to locate or afford real ones, for the sole purpose of admiring what they represent. For instance about 30 years ago, I once bought an old bent reproduction of a "peace token" which some have surmised was produced by Native Americans after receiving the real ones from Lewis & Clark. The guy I bought it from told me his grandfather had found it while fixing fence on his ranch and I had done business with him on numerous prior occasions so had no reason to not believe him. It is obviously a very old counterfeit, probably well over a hundred years old, but it has a rich history and is likely the only way I could own one of these. Value and beauty are in the eye of the beholder, which is often why one might collect coins or even the sub-category of toned coins.

I also collect many varieties of coins that are not listed anywhere and even some that likely will never be listed until new categories are created to include them into, such as those coins that might have a tiny detail or animal within the coin detail that had to have been on the original coin die in order for it to have been produced. For example, I located around a roll of cents from within a sealed bag that each contained what appears to me under magnification to be a Kodiak bear looking out at those viewing the coin. When I inquired about getting this attributed, the expert told me he could not do that because there is no category to place it into. Still to me, this is one of my favorite rare finds and the same bag also contained numerous other types of things but mostly only visible under strong magnification. Since I enjoy the hunt more than the tedious process of trying to get everything officially listed somewhere, there exists a void of legitimate finds that does not get communicated to the masses simply because of the costs and difficulties of doing so. I did once get a coin listed but it cost me over $600 and I had to sell a lot of things in order to justify that. I also discovered the "Broken Tomahawk" Bison Nickel variety and that was listed in the Nickel Coin Variety Register at the time. Yet I have indisputable RPM's, OMM's, DDO's, DDR's, etc., that simply sit in storage, some of them for decades. This knowledge also allows me to sometimes cherry-pick similar items that are also little known but do exist if one knows where and what to look for.

 

This thread is from 2012 and brought back to life in 2017. Please, not a third time.