High Points on the Lincoln Memorial Cent

[Snyderart]

I'm posting this because I looked everywhere on the web for this information with no luck. The information is available for the Lincoln Wheat Cents, but not the Memorial Cents.

I'm searching a hoard of 173 lbs. of cents a friend sold to me for errors. They are in good condition from being locked in a glass water cooler bottle for the past 20-60 years. The cents are from 1960-1999 and I wanted to pull the higher grade cents out, but was unsure of what I was looking at. Many of the coins look great to me but I can't keep them all! happydance:

So, I dug deeper into figuring out how to ballpark grade them and at least separate the uncirculated MS coins from the circulated AU coins. Closer examination and trying to ignore the overall great condition of the cents I was looking at, I could see that on the obverse there was a faint pink-to-purple discoloration in Lincoln's ear edge, hair, cheek, beard tip, and the edges of his coat. On the reverse, the discoloration was mainly along the bottom step and the two vertical buttresses and tripods flanking the steps, and faintly across the roof line. I'm guessing this discoloration is signs of wear (not toning) and automatically makes the coin an AU circulated coin.

Below is a high points diagram (marked in red) I created in Photoshop based on what I was seeing on multiple cents for both the obverse and reverse sides I examined.

I hope this helps.

Happy hunting!

[den.coelho]

I would like to weigh in here. From what you are describing, [ I look at coins 12 hrs. A day . I believe your seeing a refraction effect that is emitting a prism like color rebounding off of the very thick " poly" like resin coatings pooling in the indented areas. The best way to describe it is that unbeknownst to many, coins have coatings for " protection" as well modern coins have like a " holographicish coating that if you look with lateral darkfiekd microscopy you can see microscopic random letters that emit that same color you describe. All in all it is a pooling of the coating in the indentation. Many coins I have reviewed that have been miscatagorized as PMD have extraordinary amounts of these coverings that were somehow oversupplied, the look like they had bad coats if polyurethane applied to them, Sone coins I have examined that have yellow residue afain erroneously attributed to " nicotine, are coatings that were exposed to higher than tolerated heat levels .
Now I will say these are my opinions and as always I encourage people to do their own due dilligence.

[Daniel]

Yes your coin is circulated and for those that don't know the OP made those lines on the coin and it is not a part of the actual coin.