The largest diamond ever offered at auction went under the hammer in Geneva Tuesday for nearly $34 million, a world record for a gem of its kind, the Christie’s auction house said.
The 163.41-carat flawless D color diamond, suspended from an emerald and diamond necklace called ‘The Art of de Grisogono’, sold for $33.8 million at the Christie’s autumn jewel auction. De Grisogono is a Swiss luxury jeweler. Founded in 1993, it is available in a number of cities.
This marks “a new world-record price for a D color diamond at auction,” Rahul Kadakia, auctioneer and head of Christie’s international jewels division, told AFP.
D is the highest color grade attributed to a diamond, indicating that the stone is completely colorless, and thus extremely rare.
Some had expected the diamond, which Christie’s described as a “masterpiece of unparalleled beauty and exquisite workmanship”, to fetch a higher bid.
“I am disappointed that the Art of Grisogono didn’t sell for a more dazzling price,” said Tobias Kormind, head of 77 Diamonds, a large European online diamond jeweler, who had said before the sale he thought the price might top $50 million.
The flawless, D color diamond was cut from a 404 carat rough rock which was discovered in February 2016 in the Lulo mine in Angola - the 27th biggest rough white diamond ever discovered.
The rough was analyzed in Antwerp in Belgium and cut in New York, where a team of 10 diamond-cutting specialists were involved in mapping, plotting, cleaving, laser-cutting and polishing the giant rough rock into a polished, flawless diamond.
A team from de Grisogono then created 50 different designs around the 163.41-carat diamond, before opting for an asymmetric necklace with the stone as its centerpiece.
The left side of the necklace is made up of 18 emerald-cut diamonds and the right side composed of two rows of pear-shaped emeralds.
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