Your Thoughts On Colorized Coins

Nothing a little acetone cannot fix.

Not my thing, but to each their own, right?

We have had colourized coin here in Canada for a long time at least 25 years so we are used to them, some are good and some bad ones, on quarters, .50 , loons and toons.

I only buy colorized silver coins at a deal price. The last one was a Silver Eagle for $26.31 bought 2 months ago. Couple minute soak in acetone and rolling a Q-tip over the top cleans it up pretty quickly.

A distinction should be made in this thread between "official" and "unofficial" colorizations. "Official" colorization is applied by the Mint that made the coin; usually, the coin itself is specifically designed to have the colour applied to it, to the extent that an example of the coin without the colour on it would be considered either a damaged coin or a mint error (note: no-one should ever be paying big bucks for "missing colour" mint errors, simply because they're so easy to create with a bottle of acetone). The United States Mint has been very slow to jump onto this bandwagon, having only issued it's first officially colorized coin in 2020 and has issued very few official colorized coins, and none of those have yet been issued for circulation. Canada and Australia, on the other hand, have both issued extensive series of colorized coins, both as NCLT and as circulation coinage.

Collecting these colorized coins is very popular in both Canada and Australia and some of the most valuable and sought-after modern coins are in these coloured coin series. Take the 2012 Australian Remembrance Poppy $2 coin, which now retails for AU$900 and even well-circulated examples often sell for a couple hundred dollars - not bad for a coin initially sold for face value. The Canadian 2004 poppy quarter is likewise quite highly sought after, fetching a couple hundred for nice intact-paint examples.

Unofficial colorization is applied onto otherwise perfectly normal coins by a third party - often by a mass-marketeering company with a deceptively official-looking name like "govmint.com" or "The Patriotic Mint" - and usually sold for a significant premium over the un-painted coin. These companies advertise their products in the mass-media, but not in the numismatic media as their target market is not actual coin collectors. Being unofficial products, there is essentially zero secondary market for these pieces, as actual coin collectors (as a whole) don't like them and don't want them in their collections. In order to be paid anything above face/bullion value, you basically need to get lucky and find someone out there who actually likes the artwork on your specific painted coin.

That would be classified as "plated" rather than "colorized". A somewhat similar effect (and similarly unoffical for US coins) but a different technique.

I do kinda like those. I have been considering getting an Ike like that for my collection.

I purchase them if they are part of a series I am collecting.
eg. the "Silver Maple Leafs With Colour" (five dollar 1 oz. bullion, RCM)


or the "Canadian Commemorative Silver Dollar" series ( RCM):

@Sap summarized the topic well in his reply.

My long term views have been - Official issues are numismatic products. Third party issues are gimmicks to be avoided