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Naturally Retoning Copper
Wahoo554
Posts: 1,180 ✭✭✭✭✭
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.
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Thanks for the tip.
I definitely would not pack it with cheap cardboard. It will most likely end up with an artificial blue/purple color.
@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.
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: