An unusually large pink diamond sold for a record-breaking $50 million (Rs 361 crore) on Tuesday at Christie’s auction house in Geneva.
Christie’s said renowned jeweller Harry Winston was the buyer, saying it was a new world record price per carat for a pink diamond.
Called the Pink Legacy, the diamond is 18.96-carat. Christie’s international head of jewelry, Rahul Kadakia, praising the jewel was quoted as saying, “It is one of the best and finest examples of pink diamonds at this size and colour and it proved it with a new world record price per carat". Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters
The diamond went under the hammer as part of the annual Magnificent Jewels auction and attracted a huge amount of interest because of its large size and impressive colour grading. The expensive vividly coloured diamond was discovered in a South African mine around a century ago and was ‘probably cut in the 1920s’. Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters
The unique diamond once belonged to the Oppenheimer family, which for decades ran the De Beers diamond mining company and controlled much of the world’s diamond trade over three generations. It is not known who the current owner is. Pink Legacy is categorised as a “Fancy Vivid” diamond, the highest grade of colour intensity. Only 1 in 100,000 diamonds receives the grading. Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters
The remarkable stone will not be the most expensive diamond ever sold however. In 2013, a pink diamond weighing 59.6 carats went under the hammer at Sotheby's for $83 million (Rs 599 crore). Meanwhile, in November, during a Christie's auction in Hong Kong the nearly 15-carat Pink Promise was sold for $32.5 million (Rs 234 crore). Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters