Topps Finest/Grading

[Eric72]

My observations, as someone who bought quite a few Finest cards back in '90s:

Personally, looking at those Finest coatings always bothered me. Totally clear coatings generally looked fine. The ones that had printed instructions (telling the collector to peel them off) looked ridiculous to me, though.

I began experimenting with the peel-off coating, using commons, fairly soon after getting these. The results were frustratingly inconsistent.

Sometimes, the peel would come off cleanly and reveal a pristine surface. I believe this is what Topps intended.

Other times, the peel would come off cleanly; however, the surface would look spotted and slightly cloudy/filmy. The appearance reminded me of a glass coming out of an older dishwasher.

Occasionally, the peel would remove bits of surface from the card. Seriously. I would remove the peel and wind up with a card that suffered "paper loss." I didn't call it that because no part of the card seemed like paper. The end result was the same, though. Removing the peel had removed part of the surface of the card.

I haven't done this in a while, perhaps in the year 2005 or so. Cards that had been sitting around for 10 years seemed to fare worse than the cards did when they were relatively new. I personally wouldn't peel off a 25 year old coating without first testing on some commons from the same set. Even then, don't expect the process to go smoothly 100% of the time.