Naturally Retoning Copper

Wahoo554

I collect love tokens and have an interesting piece that is bright red from some type of treatment at some point. Any recommendations on how I should store it to help facilitate it acquiring a darker/more natural looking patina over time? Thanks.

jmlanzaf

Pack it with a piece of cheap cardboard.

Wahoo554

@jmlanzaf said:
Pack it with a piece of cheap cardboard.

Thanks for the tip.

TheRegulator

I definitely would not pack it with cheap cardboard. It will most likely end up with an artificial blue/purple color.

jmlanzaf

@TheRegulator said:
I definitely would not pack it with cheap cardboard. It will most likely end up with an artificial blue/purple color.

No reason for it to turn blue. "Album toning" is the result of sulfur in the cardboard. The old Kraft envelopes also are basically cheap, high sulfur paper.

It is also worth noting that the normal color of a cent is not sure to copper but to copper sulfide. The strpped, pinkish hue is the color of pure copper.

Wahoo554

@jmlanzaf do you have any idea what might have been done to the token to make it shiny, e.g chemical treatment vs. polishing? All I want is for it to ideally eventually return to a more natural dark color similar to this example. No idea whether that’s possible based on what was done to it. I assume the token in question is a shaved down British penny.

Walkerguy21D

I’ve had some success and some unsuccessful results using different methods.

This cent came from an old Wayte Raymond album, when I acquired it about 10-12 years ago, it was a faux brick red with a little bit of retoning underway. I stored it in a Kraft envelope. In 2019 it looked like this:

Today it looks like this, pretty much the same, so most of the toning occurred in the first 4 years or so.

This came from the same album. It had kind of a funky gold/blue tone probably from an ancient cleaning. The Kraft envelope didn’t do anything, so I tried a warm window sill for a year or so, still no change. The past year or so I put it with cardboard and that seems to have worked:

jmlanzaf

@Wahoo554 said:
@jmlanzaf do you have any idea what might have been done to the token to make it shiny, e.g chemical treatment vs. polishing? All I want is for it to ideally eventually return to a more natural dark color similar to this example. No idea whether that’s possible based on what was done to it. I assume the token in question is a shaved down British penny.

The color looks like acid cleaning. If it's shiny as though polished, it might have been rubbed down with brass cleaner or something similar.