Guides › Skills

Using UV and magnification

Seeing what the eye misses.

A loupe or microscope reveals tool marks, wear direction, repairs, and casting bubbles. Always examine before cleaning — cleaning is the destruction of evidence you have not yet read.

Work systematically at 10× before going higher: edges, high points, recesses, and the back. Wear should follow use; tool marks should suit the period’s technology.

Under UV (longwave is the safe household kind), modern adhesives, resins, overpaint, and many restorations fluoresce differently from original surfaces — a repaired break can leap out as a dark or bright line. Some materials have signatures of their own, like amber’s bluish glow.

Raking light — a torch held almost parallel to the surface — is the third cheap instrument, lifting engraving, inscriptions, and file marks the eye misses head-on. Record what each examination actually showed, not what you hoped it would.

From the guide library inside Collectors Catalogues, a free app for cataloguing antiques and finds with honest, museum-grade records.

More on skills

Reading patina — What surface color tells you — and doesn’t.

Spotting casting seams — How an object was made narrows its date.

Recognising modern copies — The tells of a later reproduction.

General signs of a reproduction — What later copies get wrong.

Reading hallmarks and maker marks — A punched paper trail.

Weighing and the density test — Mass tells on fakes.

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