Fake Patinas

The Constantine coins are all high grade and all have that rich brown patina. I think I would be more concerned that they are outright fakes. They all look good to me, but there has been outstanding fakes showing up lately it's getting hard to tell.

The coins looked fine to me, decent condition and fairly common for the most part. Often the lighting someone uses might make coins look "odd." I once had someone ask me why my coins looked "odd" on my ebay listings and last week someone also thought that one of my coins might have had a fake patina.

I only really trust coins I've personally cleaned., I have seena nicely applied fake patina before in that style, but it was better executed. This is called Syrian red - perhaps the guy is lucky and has managed to get a nice lot out of Syria, where I suspect there are piles building up. I ehar that after the fall f the Iron Curtain, millions of roman coins found on Soviet farms flooded the market - if we're lucky, the same could happen here.

Fake patinas can come in all kinds of colours, and be applied with all kinds of skills. Besides the "Dellers Darkener" look you're most likely to find in the West, there's the "feed it to the goat" corroded look from the Middle East, there's the "left out in the rain for a couple of decades" look from Vietnam... and even the "crush up old corroded coins, mix the dust with glue and paste it onto new coins" look from China.