FANCY PINK DIAMONDS

A five-minute telephonic tussle on April 4, 2017, which included three bidders calling into the auction room at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, ended when Hong Kong-based jewelry retailer Chow Tai Fook bought a 59.6-carat pink diamond, fittingly called the Pink Star, for about $71 million. It was the highest price ever paid for any gemstone on public sale.

So ended an unusual saga, which had begun at Sotheby’s in Geneva in 2013, when the same diamond sold to a New York dealer for million. It not only broke a world record, or so it was believed, but it was the third most expensive item sold anywhere at auction that year. But the buyer failed to come up with the cash, and Sotheby’s, which had guaranteed the sale, was forced to pay the owner and put the stone in its vault for safekeeping.

Today, the Pink Star, which incidentally was the largest internally flawless fancy vivid pink diamond ever graded by the Gemological Institute of America, has been renamed the CTF Pink, and it is being used commemorate Chow Tai Fook’s 88th anniversary. The stone, which was mined by De Beers in Botswana, and initially named the Steinmetz Pink after the company that took two years to cut it, was first worn in public at the 2003 Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix by Danish model Helena Christensen.

There are probably no gemstones that more effectively capture the public imagination than pink Fancy Colored Diamonds, and they have done so for centuries. The Daria-i-Noor, for instance, a pale pink stone, is one of the most renowned. It weighs about 182 carats, and used to be part of the Iranian Crown Jewels before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. It is now believed to be held in of Central Bank of Iran in Tehran. Like the legendary Koh-i-Noor, it was mined at the Paritala-Kollur Mine in Andhra Pradesh, India.