PINK FANCY COLOR DIAMONDS

PRETTY IN PINK

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.

In 1965, a Canadian team conducting research on the Iranian Crown Jewels came to the conclusion that that the Daria-i-Noor possibly had been part of an even larger large pink diamond described in a 1642 document by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. They surmised that stone it had been cut into two pieces, with the larger part becoming the Daria-i-Noor; and the smaller part, a 60-carat stone, which was cut into the Noor-ul-Ain diamond, which was the centerpiece of a tiara, also among the Iranian Crown Jewels.

The fourth largest pink diamond ever cut is reputed to be the 34.65-carat Princie Diamond, which was first discovered about 300 years ago in the Golconda mines in India. Christie’s auctioned it on April 16, 2013, and it fetched a when a price of $39.3 million.

Before the Pink Star took the title, the most expensive colored diamond ever sold was the Graff Pink, a 24.78-carat stone once owned by Harry Winston. The diamond, which was mounted in a ring, was sold by Sotheby’s auctioneers in Geneva, Switzerland on November 16, 2010, to diamond dealer Laurence Graff for $46 million. It was classified by the Gemological Institute of America as “fancy intense pink.”