Editor’s Note
This article examines the frenzied market for rare colored diamonds, highlighting recent record-breaking sales at major auction houses. The extraordinary prices reflect extreme rarity, yet they prompt questions about the valuations driving this niche luxury sector.
At every auction, they trigger a real hysteria. Colored diamonds are breaking records one after another, as auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s consistently experience. Just last week, the former sold a pink diamond for $83 million, making the “Pink Star” the most expensive precious stone in history, while the latter sold “The Orange”, an orange diamond, for $35.54 million. These staggering sums are justified by the rarity of these stones but also by a genuine fashion effect.
First, rarity. This is the argument used by auction houses to justify these staggering prices.
confirms Bruno Pozzera, gemologist and founder of the website diamants-infos.com, who notes that their certification was established by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), “the Rolls-Royce of certification.”
adds David Warren, head of the jewelry division at Christie’s. And
adds David Bennett, gemology expert at Sotheby’s.
The color palette of these diamonds is wide – red, blue, yellow, pink, orange – but their presence on the Earth’s surface is just as exceptional. For example, the Australian Argyle mine, owned by Rio Tinto, is the only place in the world that contains pink diamonds. Other colored stones are scattered in Africa, like “The Orange” unearthed in South Africa.
The color of the few “vivid” quality diamonds, whose weight is generally less than 4 carats, is often explained by the presence of a coloring agent that penetrates the earth and changes the normally white color of the stone, Christie’s specifies. This “accident of nature” would explain why the price per carat of a colored diamond can reach 50 times that of a white stone.
asserts Bruno Pozzera.
says the expert.
he adds.
The very divergent profiles of the buyers tend to confirm this hypothesis. If the buyer of the Pink Star was identified as a New York lapidary, that of “The Orange” was simply described as a “major collector.” That of the “Sun Drop”, a 110.3-carat yellow diamond sold for 8 million euros in 2011, was “an anonymous private individual”… One thing is certain: these buyers come from traditional markets like Australia, the United States, Japan, and Europe, but increasingly from emerging powers such as India and China.
Sotheby’s assures. The rain of records is therefore far from over.
