On Friday night, auction house Sotheby’s sold ‘The Williamson Pink Star’, an 11.15-carat rare pink diamond, described as “one of the world’s purest diamonds” for a record $57.73 million or Rs 478.19 crore. The price tag included Sotheby’s Hong Kong’s auctioneer fees.
The precious stone was sold to collector Boca Raton, Fla., and was renamed Rosenberg Williamson Pink Star.
With the sale, Williamson Pink Star became the second-most expensive diamond to be sold at an auction, reported Forbes.
The record for the world’s most expensive auctioned diamond is still held by CTF Pink Star, a 59.60-carat oval mixed-cut diamond, which was sold at Sotheby’s for US$71.2 million or Rs 589.76 crore in April 2017.
“The Williamson Pink Star is second-largest internally flawless, fancy vivid pink diamond to ever appear at auction. Yielded from a 32-carat rough diamond at the Williamson Mine in Tanzania, the Williamson Pink Star has since been masterfully cut into a dazzling cushion-cut, bringing out the diamond’s innermost beauty to full display,” according to auctioneer’s website.
The rare pink diamond to be auctioned on Friday night was named after the Williamson Mine in Tanzania. The mine later nationalised by the Tanzanian government was originally discovered by Canadian geologist John Williamson in 1940 and is famous for producing “bubblegum pink diamonds”.
How rare is The Williamson Pink Star?
Of all the diamonds submitted to the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), less than 3% of diamonds are classified as naturally coloured and less than 5% of those are considered predominantly pink, according to the American auction house.
“Most pink diamonds therefore fall into the ranges of Faint Pink to Fancy Pink, and only a few have a strong face-up colour that can be described as Fancy Vivid Pink; and those are often small in size. Because of this, for a Fancy Vivid Pink diamond to weigh over 10 carats is extremely rare. For instance, in 2018, the GIA selected a sample of 1,000 pink diamonds from their database of coloured diamonds graded between 2008 and 2016 and found that 83% weighed less than 1 carat,” it added.
