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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 497011, member: 112"]No, no coin can be wiped without leaving hairlines. And I don't care how soft the cloth is. And anyone who thinks they can do so is mistaken. Even though the untrained eye may not see them - the trained eye will see them. Even on low grade circulated coins the hairlines created by the wiping are going to be there. But as Mark said, there won't be much impact; 1 - because there are usually so many on circ coins anyway that you won't really notice them and 2 - a few more hairlines on a circ coin is not going to lower the grade any. There have long been 2 schools of thought on this. For centuries it was thought to be perfectly accpetable to take a cloth and polish your coins up all bright and shiny. But the closest I can pin it down is that sometime in the early 20th century collectors and numismatists began to realize that doing this destroyed the mint luster on a coin. They realized that polishing or wiping their coins with a cloth left marks and destroyed the originality of the coin. Based on the experience of my own family, by the 1930's there was an ever growing group among collectors who advocated not cleaning their coins with harsh or improper methods. That group has since grown until today it is by far the majority, and those who think that wiping a coin with a cloth or using harsh cleaning methods is OK is the minority.[/QUOTE]