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“The Spirit of the Rose,” a rare purple rose diamond mined in Russia, was sold at Sotheby’s auction for nearly $ 27 million. A photo taken in press preview on November 6, 2020.
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images
The largest purple-pink diamond ever sold at auction was sold in Geneva, Switzerland, for 24,393,000 Swiss francs ($ 26,700,871).
The purple-pink diamond, called “The Spirit of the Rose,” was sold to an anonymous buyer, bidding over the phone at Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday. It weighs 14.8 carats but was cut from a larger rough diamond weighing 27.8 carats, discovered in Yakutia, northeastern Russia in 2017.
The rough diamond is said to have been the largest pink crystal ever to be mined in Russia and was named “Nijinksy” in honor of the legendary Russian-Polish ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. “The Spirit of the Rose” was the name given to the cut diamond, after the last ballet that Nijinsky performed on stage.
It took the Russian master cutters a year to shape the end diamond, giving it an oval shape to ensure it would have the maximum size.
Pink diamonds were first discovered in India in the 17th century, and their color is believed to be the result of a distortion of the “crystal lattice,” or its atomic arrangement. This is “created by intense heat and high pressure after the stone has formed in the earth,” according to an explanation on Sotheby’s website.
“This distortion displaces many carbon atoms from their normal position and alters the qualities of light reflected from the diamond – which makes us observe the stone as being pink,” the auction house explained.
Pink diamonds differ from other colored diamonds because there are no trace chemicals present in its formation. For example, the presence of nitrogen forms yellow diamonds, while boron creates blue diamonds.
It is said that only 1% of pink diamonds are larger than 10 carats in size and only 4% are graded “fancy vivid”.
The “CTF Pink Star”, weighing 59.6 carats, holds the current record for the price paid for a pink diamond at auction, at $ 71.2 million, sold in Hong Kong in April 2017.
“La Grande Table”, which was shown to a French merchant and adventurer in India in the 17th century, is considered the largest pink diamond recorded to date, at over 200 carats.
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