Sotheby’s unveiled The Pink Star: the largest Internally Flawless, Fancy Vivid pink diamond ever graded by the GIA.
Weighing 59.60 carats, it is the most valuable cut diamond ever offered at auction, estimated to sell for more than $60 million (£48.3 million) when it is auctioned at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong on April 4. The current world record holder is the Oppenheimer Blue diamond, which sold for $57.5 million at Christie’s in Geneva last May.
The Pink Star was cut from a 132.5-carat rough diamond mined by De Beers in Africa in 1999. It took two years of meticulous cutting and polishing to hone it into its current oval shape. It has been offered for sale before, achieving a record £52 million at Sotheby’s Geneva in November 2013, but the buyer defaulted on his payment, leaving the stone to be added to the Sotheby’s inventory.
“At a time of unprecedented demand for the finest in coloured diamonds, I am delighted to be bringing this magnificent stone back to the market,” said David Bennett, Worldwide Chairman of Sotheby’s Jewellery Division. “The extraordinary size of this 59.60-carat diamond, paired with its richness of colour, surpasses any known pink diamond recorded in history.”
The Pink Star is twice as big as the Graff Pink
The current record price for a pink diamond sold at auction is the $46.2 million achieved by the 24.78-carat Graff Pink, which sold at Sotheby’s Geneva in 2010. The Pink Star is more than twice as big as the Graff Pink, and its colour rating, ‘Fancy Vivid’, is the highest possible grade on the scale used to assess colored diamonds, and therefore considered the most valuable.
The pink diamond is also rated as Internally Flawless, meaning it has no internal inclusions, and is a Type IIa stone, the coveted classification given to less than two per cent of all gem-quality diamonds, which signifies chemical purity.
The 59.60-carat Pink Star pink diamond is estimated to achieve over $60 million when it is offered at auction in Hong Kong
