How Do You Tell If A Coin Has Been Previously Cleaned?

Darkness around the date vs brighter area above the date indicates a cleaning to me.

If you look at alot of 1914-s Lincoln cents for sale on ebay you will start to see which one have a more natural look.

I agree with the one comment about experimenting your self. If you lived nearby, I would loan you my supply of eZest and other chemicals that will take an old penny and make it shinny new. Of course it does not add back the worn off wheat lines or other wear that the coin has been thru....

There is also re-toning... which also takes a keen eye to spot.

And have a prize to whoever guess's the most correct .

I usually look for dirt inside letters or numbers with a place for those to hide. Such as inside a e or o or something like that.

Nonna, for the coin you posted the easiest thing to see is the haloing effect. look around the date, and you see the dark shadow, then the lighter field in front of Lincoln.

that image is not a great one, to see any real details of the coin.

I would suggest passing on this one, if you have concerns about the condition you will always have those concerns. And trying to resell a coin that has been cleaned is not easy.

No! No! No! A pencil eraser will destroy a coin. Only try it on a worthless Wheat cent and see what happens. It will be a good test/experiment for you.

In my opinion, it would be just about impossible to articulate what a cleaned coin looks like verbally or in writing. It's something you gotta see with a trained eye.

Google is your friend. There's a lot out there.

Or it was dark and then got a little more circulation which removed some of the color in the open field area but not in the protected area around the date. The fact that the way the coin is lit also puts more light in that filed area doesn't help. Darkness or "Halos" around lettering do not always indicate cleaning.

Frankly the provided image is not really good enough to determine if it is cleaned or not. But it doesn't provide an appealing representation of the coin in any case.

Absolutely true. The only way to be sure is to have possession of the actual coin. That said you can have much more educated guesses about what is happening if you play around with photos of coins you own with different lights and make some intentionally bad ect and use clues in the photo to see how the lighting could be impacting color ect, like if an NGC slab doesn't look bright white you know the camera didn't adjust perfectly to it so the coin inside will likely not be as dark as it shows