British auction house Sotheby’s is set to auction”The Pink Star,” a 59.6-carat pink diamond estimated to fetch atleast 60 million US dollars, on Tuesday evening in Hong Kong.
The sale is part of Sotheby’s magnificent jewels and jadeite auction.
The oval mixed-cut pink diamond, roughly the size of a quail’s egg, is the largest internally flawless fancy vivid pink diamond the Gemological Institute of America has ever graded, said Sotheby’s.
“The extraordinary size of this 59.60-carat diamond, paired with its richness of colour, surpasses any known pink diamond recorded in history,” said David Bennett, Worldwide Chairman of Sotheby’s Jewellery Division in a statement.
The gem was mined by De Beers in 1999 and the 132.5 carat rough diamond was cut and polished over a period of two years by Steinmetz Diamonds.
The previous record for a pink diamond was held by the “Graff Pink,”a 24.78-carat diamond that went for 46.16 million dollars at Sotheby’s Geneva in November 2010.
The “Pink Star” itself was previously sold by Sotheby’s in 2013 for more than 83 million dollars, but the bidder defaulted on payment.
The buyer, New York diamond cutter Isaac Wolf, told media at the time he was hired by a consortium of investors to bid on the jewel.
The current price-per-carat auction record for diamonds lies with”The Blue Moon of Josephine,” a 12.03-carat blue diamond that was purchased by Hong Kong businessman Joseph Lau, for 48.5 million dollars in 2015. — dpa
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