king.aaron•1mo agoMost Upvoted

I dug up a 200 year old bottle and spent an hour cleaning it wrong

I found an old glass bottle buried in my backyard last Saturday near Austin and started scrubbing it with soap and water like a normal dish. Turns out I was rubbing off the original patina that makes it valuable to collectors. Has anyone else wrecked a find by cleaning it too aggressively?

2 comments

2 Comments

grace_gonzalez461mo ago

Actually scrubbing off the patina might be the best thing you could have done for that bottle. Most collectors are way too obsessed with that crusty old layer that makes the glass look all cloudy and gross. If you ever wanted to actually use that thing as a vase or a cool drinking glass (like, for decoration), the clean version is way more practical. Plus, a lot of those "valuable" bottles with patina are just sitting in cases gathering dust, so why not just enjoy it as a clean piece of history instead?

nathan4921mo ago

Wait, are you saying I actually did that bottle a favor? I mean, I scrubbed one clean a few years back and my buddy Dan still gives me grief about it every time we hang out. He's got a whole shelf of bottles with that greenish gunk on them and they just sit there looking like something you'd dig up in a backyard. I told him at least my bottle can hold a nice bouquet of wildflowers or sit on a windowsill without looking like a science experiment gone wrong. And honestly, @grace_gonzalez46 you make a solid point about that patina just being crusty old buildup half the time anyway. My clean bottle gets used as a water carafe on my desk, and it starts conversations way more than Dan's dusty ones ever do.