Too Much Yellow!

I know exactly which dealer you are referring to.

If not for the shape of the flan I would not identify it as the same coin. Extensive (and expert) tooling and smoothing has altered it beyond recognition. The fake patination makes the deception complete.

Thanks for raising this issue. There does exist such a thing as a genuine desert patina, but it is unusual. When almost every coin of a dealer has perfect highlighting of the details then you can expect they are "enhanced".

January1may, short of recognizing specific coins from previous sales, where they may have appeared pre-patina (as we've seen in some examples in this thread), there's just no way to know for sure. However, I reiterate that when a certain dealer uploads many hundreds of AE coins over a number of months, from numerous different cultures and locations , and more than 90% of them have essentially the same yellow coating, it's a safe bet that a healthy number have been "worked."

Nice looking bargain bin lot you've got there.

I was just looking at the latest additions to the inventory of the seller in question.

...when I decide to start adding sliced carrots to my collection, I'll keep him in mind

I revived this old thread and provided a link earlier this morn to a post that I wrote last night, dealing with the same issue (applied patinas), at another forum - where, btw, it has received 20 "likes" and numerous positive replies as of this writing. Apparently I must have unintentionally violated one of CCF's rules but, to be honest, I am not sure which one. (I've been going through the list of rules since my post here was deleted earlier) Maybe the "competing links" rule? I'd appreciate an email from the mods to tell me what I did wrong. The topic here is important, particularly for newer collectors of ancients. Some of the replies in the linked thread had important, useful information. So please let me know.

Myself, I have only recently become aware of this. I must have somehow missed all the posts made on the subject in the past. However, I did figure out that something was fishy about all those orange coins on my own... It went like this:

As I was looking through the listings of Roman coins at the British version of ebay I found a certain user offering two lots of 40* coins each, all of them with this orange look to them. With my minimal knowledge I was able to notice that the coins ranged from 3rd to 5th century. I thought it was unlikely that coins mited in the year 200-something still circulated in 400-something, so these probably didn't come from one hoard (which would explain their appearance). And yet they looked exactly the same. So I read the item description and found the coins being described as having "desirable desert patina". Somehow, that single word was the biggest red flag that made me search for fake desert patina and read a thread about it at the site which Bob L originally linked to.

Thank you for bringing this thread to my attention. Even though I was already aware of the practice, I didn't know just how much damage/pitting/etc. all this make-up can hide.

*these listings are gone now so I cannot check how many coins were in each lot, 40 is my guess, could have been more.

Bob L, thanks for posting this (and I read your other post as well at the other Forum).