On Cleaned Coins--Yea Or Strong Nay?

I never liked cleaned coins . But if the coin has great eye appeal I might consider it as long as it's not harsh ,and the price has to be right .

Occasionally, I will buy cleaned coins at an appropriately reduced price.

Indeed, with ancient coins they are all cleaned, because that is necessary after recovery from in ground burial. A cleaned ancient coin is very often easier to sell.

With modern coins, it depends on value for purchase money, which sometimes gives the cleaned coin an advantage. Cleaned coins are always valued at a lower level than their uncleaned equivalent.

At the lower end of coin collecting, cleaning a coin may just be exchanging one problem for another. An unsightly $10 coin might be worth cleaning. There's not much to lose. I do not believe in harsh cleaning, though.

Given that cleaned coins generally instantly lose a big part of their value after cleaning, I'm generally opposing cleaning coins. I won't do it myself (except from a slight brush to remove some dirt or fingerprints).

There is, however, one exception I have to make. I do happen to collect a few type sets in which uncleaned coins in AU or MS condition are completely unaffordable (some go for $10.000 or more). In those cases I can settle for cleaned coins: it's better to have a cleaned coin than no coin. One of the main reasons we have a lot of cleaned coins is Samlerhuset. They are a company selling expensive coins as 'valuable collecting objects' to mostly ignorant people: as such they are the biggest coin sellers in Norway. A cleaned coin looks better than an uncleaned one to the untrained eye, so they just destroy the actual coin for short term profit. When all those coins hit the free market again, they start making up a relatively large part of the total population... it's sad, but that leaves the cleaned ones as only viable option for my budget.

If it looks good to the eye, and not blatantly artificial, I have no problem with them at all.

In fact I had some impaired proof, clad JFKs I found in circulation (extras) that were horrible looking. I hardly recognized them by eye as proofs. What made them stick out was their stronger details.

Since they are only worth ¢50 each, I took a Dremel and polishing compound to them. Now they resemble their former, mirror polish, but tilted the right way you see a circular buffing mark.

Will they be in my first set? No. But in my secondary set they don't look bad in the album and remind you of a proof. Now instead of me saying, "what a shame such a good looking coin is so horrible looking," they appear to have some of their former glory.

Some were bad enough that even if they had any numismatic premium, their condition made them so no one would want them. And now people still would not want them...but they look nice.

One big area of my collection is 18th and 19th century Russian copper (and the occasional silver if I can find it cheaply enough). Nearly the entire supply for those is metal detecting finds, and most of the few exceptions are way out of my budget.

I'll definitely take an obviously cleaned coin for $1 over looking for a non-cleaned example (that might well have actually been cleaned anyway) and then having to pay $20 for it.

However, I don't really like cleaning coins otherwise (I have a very uncommon coin of early 20th century Saudi Arabia that was cleaned so harshly that its cupronickel became mostly red - I'd have probably thrown it away if it wasn't so rare).

For me, a cleaned coin would need to be one of those older / lighter cleanings that has generally retoned and of a type that is scarce to the point this is better than nothing if priced appropriately. I do have a couple of these and am glad to have the type.