this rare blue diamond, unearthed by Petra Diamonds Ltd at its Cullinan diamond mine in South Africa, is scheduled to go on sale at Sotheby’s next month with a price tag of between US$5.8 and US$8.5 million, it weighs 7.03 carats and is one of only a handful of blue diamonds in existence in the world,
The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has graded the blue diamond as flawless in clarity, the highest ranking it can give to a diamond, Cathy Malins, from Petra Diamonds, the company which mined the gem, described it as a unique find, she said: "At our mine in South Africa we mine between two and three million tonnes of rock a year but we would be very lucky to get maybe one, maybe two, blue diamonds out of that, "Quite simply we don't know when we'll mine another one",
in May 2008 a 3.73 carat diamond was sold by Sotheby's at auction for $1,328,444, (£900,000 at today's exchange rate) setting the world record price per carat for any gemstone at auction, if this diamond sells for the top estimate of $8.5m (£5.7m) it would break that record,
the person who buys it will also get to name the stone, the Stanley diamond? now where do I get the money to buy it!
Interestingly, according to wikipedia, blue is the second most common color in a diamond after the yellow-brown shades. The Hope Diamond is a blue diamond. They sell blue diamonds of all kinds here.
ReplyDelete"In order of rarity, colorless diamond, by far the most common, is followed by yellow and brown, by far the most common colors, then by blue, green, black, translucent white, pink, violet, orange, purple, and the rarest, red."This site says that only 20 red diamonds have been discovered so far, and the last one that was sold went for $1 million per carat (it was only a 1-carat stone)... and that was in 1987. Therefore, the possibility that this new blue diamond will be the highest-per-carat diamond sale ($8.5M for 7 carats) is true, but only in absolute terms. If a red diamond were ever to come up for sale again, it would crush all previous records.
(Apparently to create a red diamond, while forming in the ground it has to be exposed to radioactivity: In other words, you need to have an intersection of diamonds and uranium or other radioactive element in the ground along with it.)
There are also "chameleon diamonds" which change color when exposed to different amounts of heat and light, but those are still not as rare as red diamonds.
Dear Jil, I wonder why then all of the hype? as with I guess all of these things could it be the shade of blue? it looks much lighter than the Hope, I nearly did a post on it some time ago, to me in the pictures it looked so dark, almost like a sapphire, and what about the one that was dropped in the ocean in Titanic? Although fictional for the film again a very dark blue, I still guess it must be the shade of blue, but the question still remains, where do I get the money from! best regards, Stan and Diana.
ReplyDeleteI assume that the hype is because the diamond is "flawless."
ReplyDeleteDear Jil, strange about the "flawless" my science teacher when discussing carbon and by extension diamonds, said there would always be some small flaw in every diamond, but I guess it must only be a matter of time before a flawless one showed up, I went to one of the many web sites selling loose diamonds, it seems that for only £30,000 you can buy a 3 carat stone, but I still need the money to buy the blue one! best regards, Stan and Diana.
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