"Coins N Cards" Ebayer: Contributing To The Loss Of "Original" Coins

@slerk
Definitions are the key to understanding this.
For the coin hobby, "cleaning" means removing any original surface metal. A cleaned coin has had surface removed and has an obvious non-mint-original shine to it (as well as micro-scratches if polishing was done.

Since people who do not know any better thing "shiny" means a coin is in great shape and therefore worth a lot of money, they polish, scrub, etc. coins surfaces to make then shiny. This is "cleaning" the coin. And people in the hobby are, therefore, always told to NEVER clean a coin b/c most people do not understand what is meant and will ruin the coin.

If you spilled Pepsi onto a coin in your collection, would you leave the Pepsi there forever? Or would you run the coin under water b/c you know the water would remove the Pepsi and not change the coin in any way? BTW, distilled water is much better as there will be no mineral in it.

The above is a description of "conservation:" Removing surface contaminants without altering the original metal.

Dipping is yet another term. Dipping is putting a coin into an acid or base (EZ-EST and MS70 respectively I think - correction desired if wrong) to actually remove a microscopic layer of the metal. The level of removal is so very tiny that if, done correctly, the coin has a natural enough look to it (debatable) that coin grading companies will not label them as having been "cleaned." in fact I question whether or not some notice it at all.

Just like grading itself, Mr. Joe Averagecollector can learn how to conserve a coin and make it nigh impossible to tell anything has been done to it. There is no magic the companies use.

So conserving such that no damage is done to the coin is possible with enough practice and direct hands-on experimentation (with melt-value silver). it is crucial to find out how long to expose the metal to the chemical before the chemicals make the surfaces look unnatural (Its not long without dilution!).