Foxing On Album? Safe To Use?

"Foxing is not always organic mold or fungi. Period. Full stop" - But that is the elephant in the room right? How do you know which which. I mean if you have a stamp that catalogs at 200 dollars or more for example, are you going to take that risk and put it in a foxed album. If it the foxing is due to a chemical reaction on an album you will probably be OK, but what if it is not.

In the case of where you show the picture with the foxed spots. Do you really want to risk putting your better stamps anywhere near that thing?

Lets take the best case scenario, and the foxed stamps are in a stamp album which we are saying is oxidized iron or oxidized metals. That is a nice way of saying rust of course.

Does one want rust anywhere near valuable stamps?

Agreed. This is why my first post to the OP said this



It was common to treat foxing like a plague years ago, but much discovery has been done in the last 35 years. When paper is made with heavy metals like iron in the water (we have all seen rust color stains around a toilet bowl in various locations in the world) it causes similar looking foxing as a fungus/mold. If one page of an album has this issue, then all the rest of the pages will too, hence why people might think the foxing is 'spreading'.

Some people will freeze or microwave a foxing issue, other use various chemicals. if it is organic, then those remedies might work. But conservation articles are full of accounts where this kind of remediation does not work. It seems logical to me to assume that this is because there are multiple things going on. And recent publications on this topic bear this out.

There are also now conservation articles on how to tell the difference but my informal reading on it left me with the impression that detection methods (chemical analysis, UV light, etc.) are still evolving.

But without doubt, mold/fungus can be at play and hobbyists should be cautious.
Don

Since OP's spots on the edges of the pages span a few to many pages, I suspect that this stuff is on the pages and not in the pages. (I'm sure some impurities can transfer page to page; doesn't look like that - to me - in this instance.)

The casual collector is not going to know what he or she has; nor will the future buyer. There is plenty of material out there that doesn't exhibit this damage. I'd be moving it on, personally.

I have different materials that exhibit some "foxing". As they are separate from the better material that I have it is not a major concern, however the thought of trying to stop or fix the problem had not occurred to me. I will have to see if I might try a remedy and then report back as to the success or lack of it on this forum.
Definitely worth a try, especially with items of lower value.