9
Colored Diamond
The King of Diamonds
No other gem I know of is so rare as a real blue diamond.
—Evalyn Walsh McLean
I have held many remarkable gems in my hands, stones with famous owners, twisting histories, and a sense of mystery as captivating as the light that shines out of them. But none had ever affected me like this one. The cushion-shaped brilliant nesting in my palm was a marvel of geology and history in its own right: one of the truly awesome examples of the rare breed that is blue diamond. It was about to go up for auction in what was likely to be the biggest public sale of a colored diamond ever made. But as I looked at the gem, somehow none of that seemed to matter. I suddenly had no thought for the historic importance of the stone or the price it might fetch. I just stared at it. As I did so, I felt something I had never experienced before in the presence of a gemstone. Not the sense of the gem giving me something—a feeling of joy, a frisson of power, or a jolt of recognition—but rather a part of me being taken; of my being sucked back into it. I felt pulled in, as if I were falling into a dangerous lake. It was like a piece of my soul had been extracted and absorbed into the grayish-blue pool of the diamond. Some small piece of me gone forever.
It is not unusual for the most remarkable gems to induce a physical reaction, and especially so with blue diamonds. A few years later I would be shown one of such astonishingly deep, sapphire-like blue that a rash started to creep across my chest and up my neck—something that the dealers who own it still like to tease me about. But the Wittelsbach was different. No other stone had, or has, left me feeling this way—like I had lost something in the process of falling under its spell. That, having seen it and held it in my hand, in some small way I would never be the same again.
Nor would the diamond. It was about to be purchased for a record-smashing $24.3 million and see its fate altered on the polishing wheel. My encounter with this gem had come at a critical juncture in a history already chock-full of intrigue. The 35-carat, postage-stamp-size stone had emerged from the Golconda region in India, usually thought to have been the same Kollur mine that produced the Koh-i-Noor as well as some of history’s most famous colored diamonds. Another of the most prominent blues (the Hope Diamond) and the foremost of the greens (the Dresden Green), along with a number of historic pinks (including the Darya-i-Noor and Noor-ul-Ain), are all believed to have come from this source.
Records of the Wittelsbach begin in the seventeenth century. Although the familiar narrative that it was purchased by King Philip IV of Spain as the dowry for his daughter, Infanta Margarita Teresa, has been brought into question, it has been established that she likely did own the diamond. She bequeathed it to her husband, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, after her death in 1673, aged just twenty-one.[1] By inheritance and intermarriage, the stone enjoyed a royal progress through the Spanish, Habsburg, and ultimately Bavarian dynasties, where it became established as a Crown Jewel—most notably on the Royal Crown of Bavaria after the former electorate became a monarchy in 1806. It was from the House of Wittelsbach that the diamond took its name and in its hands that it enjoyed its longest period of ownership. Not until the twentieth century did it emerge onto the open market: a failed attempt was made to sell it in 1931 to raise funds, and only in 1951 did it finally leave Germany.
Ironically, it was through the jewelry trade that this almost matchless gemstone threatened to become lost and its famous history obscured. A prominent Belgian diamond dealer had bought the stone but made so little fuss about it—including exhibiting it anonymously at a major exhibition in 1958—that on his death his family appear not to have recognized what it was. Only when they took it to another Antwerp-based jeweler for recutting was its real identity detected. That jeweler was Jozef Komkommer, and instead of drastically reshaping the diamond as asked, he recognized its heritage and bought it from his would-be clients, safeguarding its shape and significance. Having failed to sell it back to what remained of the House of Wittelsbach, he found a buyer at the end of 1964. This was Helmut Horten, a German retail entrepreneur, who presented the diamond to his new wife, Heidi, at their wedding party in Cap d’Antibes in 1966. It was through her that the stone came to Christie’s some forty years later in 2008, and into the palm of my hand.[*1]
Many gemstones have had notable historical journeys, including prominent owners and enticing tales of being lost and found. So what made this diamond so special that it attracted one of the biggest bids ever made, and left me feeling so profoundly affected? Quite simply, it was the color. Diamonds are remarkable things to look at and so, in different ways, are colored gemstones. But nothing comes close to the effect achieved when you put the two together—the deep emotional associations of color, dazzling at maximum brilliance thanks to the close-packed cubic carbon structure of the diamond, and its unique light-bending properties. There is no mystery at all about why the list of the most expensive gemstones ever sold is largely a list of colored diamonds.[*2] They are the brightest and the best, the rarest and the most remarkable: all the most desirable qualities of a gemstone brought together, every mind-altering trick of light and color at their disposal.
Colored diamonds come in almost every hue imaginable, from the commoner yellows and browns to the routinely record-breaking pinks and blues, and outrageously rare oranges, greens, purples, and reds—the latter being so scarce that they are seldom seen on the market. Their value is directly linked to their color, usually assessed by the global authority in diamond grading, the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). Measured on a scale ranging from light to fancy, intense, vivid, deep, and dark, the GIA’s color-grading system encompasses both the tone (relative darkness) and the saturation (strength) of the color.
Blues are not the rarest of this bunch, but they have often been the colored diamonds to break records and fire imaginations. These are the Type IIb diamonds, given their color by boron, that represent just one hundredth of a percent of the total supply. Stones such as the Wittelsbach, the Hope, the Oppenheimer Blue, and the Blue Moon of Josephine are the select few of an already tiny subset. Some are historic and have passed through the hands of many owners, whereas others have been relatively recently pulled out of the earth by modern mining machinery. Regardless, they are the unicorns of their breed, around which enigmatic histories, celebrated owners, and eye-watering price tags have clustered. As I experienced with the Wittelsbach, there is something tangibly evocative about boronic blue that adds yet another layer to their allure. While they can reach the sky-high heights of baby blue, most emotive are often the deeper, darker, more sea-like stones. Older gems in particular, cut for weight over color, often retain a softness to their tone, a watery quality that recalls the depths of the ocean or a dark pond. It was into just such a deep pool that the Wittelsbach had dragged me.
And now this celebrated stone was about to change—not just ownership but size, shape, and even name. The 2008 sale did not just attract a mammoth price tag. It also passed the Wittelsbach diamond into the hands of a new and highly significant owner, the jeweler Laurence Graff, one of the most influential figures in the industry and a legend in the field of colored diamonds. The decision he made to rework the stone would bitterly divide the trade, revealing the fierce debates that surround these gems as well as reinforcing the central importance of the cut to any diamond’s story.
In terms of weight, the impact of this surgery was only slight, slimming down the stone from 35.56 to 31.06 carats. Yet the effect was remarkable. The gentle, soft, grayish tones that my eyes had swum through were gone, replaced by a much purer, cleaner blue. The culet—the bottom facet of the diamond—had been reduced, allowing for more improved light-giving facets around the base. By updating a stone that had probably last been cut in the seventeenth century and applying modern techniques, Graff had given his famous diamond the gift of perfect clarity, stoked the stone’s “fire,” and enhanced its ability to throw out reflections. Less light was seeping out of the back of the stone—the silent sucking away at my soul, which had given rise to my feeling of somehow being spiritually robbed. Now it was being brilliantly reflected back for the benefit of the observer, making the diamond about as bright as could be. The Wittelsbach-Graff doesn’t just look livelier and tidier than its former incarnation. It also appears distinctly bluer. With the lack of light, so went the gray. On its own terms, this was a masterpiece of the diamantaire’s art, showing once again how much of the diamond’s appearance depends on the quality of the cut and polish.
The Wittelsbach’s evolution into the Wittelsbach-Graff was remarkable, but also hugely controversial. Many dealers, curators, and connoisseurs cried foul and declared a scandal. For them, the refashioning of such an iconic diamond was a desecration, mutilating a valuable historic object. One museum director complained that the stone had been “turned into a piece of hard candy” and said that it was akin to painting over a Rembrandt.[2] A fellow diamond-cutter declared it “barbarism,” saying: “You cannot begin to describe the damage he has done. The stone may look a bit more lively and sparkling, but its history has been destroyed.”[3] Anger was particularly apparent in Germany, with the feeling that a piece of national history had been lost. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung even published an obituary for the stone, describing its recutting as the “abolition of eternity.”[4] Other complaints centered around the fact that Graff had also slapped his name on the stone, and that he had carved up a historic piece purely to increase the market value of the object—which the reworking certainly had done.[*3] It was hard cash over history, critics lamented: an ugly symbol of commerce’s triumph over art.
As hypnotized as I was by the original stone, I could still see two sides to the story.[*4] Embracing the history of gemstones also means accepting how central the process of change has been to that history. Almost every notable stone has changed ownership, changed use, and changed setting on multiple occasions. Many of them have also changed form—being recut into new shapes, or having names engraved onto them. Few diamonds ever retain their original form: the roughs that emerge from the mines are only special because of what human hands do to cut, polish, and market them. All brilliant diamonds have been worked. So at what stage should the manufacturing of a stone be declared complete, when time and technological developments only offer us better ways of showcasing these marvels of nature?[*5]
In the case of the now Wittelsbach-Graff, the diamond had also been badly bashed about from centuries of wear and had inherited chips and bruises around the edge of its ultrafine and very irregular girdle—the thin facet running all the way around the edge of the stone. By tidying those up and reducing the culet, the diamond reappeared far less damaged, but entirely recognizable—still clearly the historic Wittelsbach, just neatened up. The integrity and outline of the stone had been retained while improving its beauty and overall appearance: something that could only have been done by the best in the business—both the most experienced and the most audacious. Perhaps the knocks and chips that the stone had picked up were signs of a life excitingly lived, but so was this next chapter. Its newest incarnation would now also become a part of its history.
This humanity is a large part of what makes the diamond so captivating as an art object: the combination of natural beauty worked by human skill, for aesthetic improvement and financial interest. The moment a stone comes out of the earth and into our hands, it has entered a new, living journey, no longer at the whim of its earthly environment, but answerable to those who now own it. More often than not, it becomes part of a shifting industry driven by finance, profit, and success. It is human nature to want to make a mark on the world. And when it comes to legacy, reworking and renaming a diamond is about as eternal and enduring a legacy as one can hope for.
In the end, diamonds are dynamic, portable, and practical objects, not listed buildings or Old Master paintings.[*6] The truth about gems has always been, whether humans are fighting over them on the battlefield or bidding for them in an auction room, that to the victor go the spoils. Like it or not, the owners of a gemstone get to determine its fate. Those who wish to protect a stone from the cutter’s wheel can bid for it on the open market just like the competitors who dream of remaking it. This time, the victor was Laurence Graff, and his name would become part of its updated history.
Whether you consider the Wittelsbach to have been impaired or enhanced by its recutting, the storm over its modern incarnation was trivial in the context of colored-diamond history. These are not just the most valuable and, in many ways, desirable gems. They are also the standout stones in other ways—the ones most overshadowed by curses, controversies, and outlandish stories. The history of the colored diamond is everything you thought you knew about gemstones, with the volume turned up: more epic, more extraordinary, more expensive. When you are holding one of these prizes in your hand, it is not just the cut and color that take your breath away, but the story of how it got there. These narratives are the most lavish surrounding any gemstone, just as the diamond’s color and brilliance stand supreme. They are tales of theft and adventure, of battles legal and financial, of great riches and dramatic falls from grace. And the best part? Some of those stories may even be true.
In early 2010, shortly after the work on the Wittelsbach-Graff had been completed, it went on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. This was no ordinary exhibition: it showcased not just one but two of the most famous blue diamonds ever discovered. Alongside the freshly polished Wittelsbach was a stone that had been in the museum for half a century, one that had experienced several lifetimes’ worth of adventure before ending up in a display case. This was the 45.52-carat Hope Diamond—perhaps the most storied stone of them all, and certainly the gem that epitomizes best of all the twisted history of the colored diamond. When gifted to the museum in 1958, it had arrived after being sent through the post in a brown paper bag—“the safest way to mail gems,” according to the man who was giving it away, the legendary diamond dealer Harry Winston.[5] This final, humble journey was in stark contrast to all those that had preceded it. No stone has traveled across continents and between owners with more mystery and misfortune than the Hope. No gem better shows the colored diamond’s close association with curses and calamity—the idea that, behind the face, there is more than meets the eye.
Its story begins with one of the most important figures in colored-diamond history—the French merchant and explorer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. Tavernier traveled widely in India and Persia during the seventeenth century, trading some of the most magnificent gems in the world. Among his illustrious patrons was the Sun King, Louis XIV, who also pressed him to commit the story of his six voyages to print. Tavernier’s journeys through India, the first commencing in 1631, were genuinely epic. He traveled an estimated 20,000 miles in total, over a period of thirty-eight years, suffered shipwreck, and at one point was thrown in jail.[6] He was the inveterate traveler, constantly out on a quest to uncover the diamonds he had read about in the Arabian Nights and the works of Marco Polo.
Tavernier was rewarded for his intrepid spirit and assiduous cultivation of local contacts with the chance to see some truly remarkable diamonds. In 1642 he encountered—though was unable to purchase—the Great Table, a pink diamond whose moniker was no exaggeration, for it measured more than 2 inches across. A Mughal stone that was one of those taken by Nader Shah when he sacked Delhi in 1739, its pale pink would later be cut into two stones that remain part of Iran’s Crown Jewels: the 60-carat Noor-ul-Ain (“Light of the Eye”) and the 182-carat Darya-il-Noor (“Sea of Light”). The Noor-ul-Ain was mounted in the wedding tiara of Empress Farah Pahlavi by Harry Winston, for her marriage to the shah of Iran in 1959. The rectangular table-cut of the Darya-il-Noor mimics the original stone and is engraved with the name of the long-reigning shah of Iran Fath-Ali Shah Qajar (r. 1797–1834). It remains the largest pink diamond in existence.
It was on Tavernier’s final voyage to India, beginning in 1663, that he encountered something miraculous that he was able to buy: a 115.16-carat blue diamond—“net et d’un beau violet” (clean and a beautiful violet—i.e., flawless and deep blue).[7] Most likely it came from Kollur, the Golconda region’s proven producer of showstopping colored diamonds. Frustratingly, despite the extensive chronicle he recorded of his adventures in India, which included a drawing of this stone, there is no account of how it came into his possession. Tavernier may have acquired it from one of his contacts at the mine, or perhaps from a merchant elsewhere on his travels (there is a record of him purchasing an extremely expensive diamond on that trip while passing through Isfahan, in modern Iran).[8] This ambiguity over its provenance would lead to subsequent mythmaking at Tavernier’s expense, suggesting it was acquired in more illicit circumstances than are credible. All we know for sure is that, in December 1668, he met with Louis XIV and his powerful finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and sold a job lot of more than one thousand diamonds including his star find—described by court records as “a large blue diamond in the shape of a heart, thick, cut in the Indian style.”[9] The Sun King quickly set about making his new prize shine, ordering his court jeweler Jean Pitau to recut it. Since it had initially been faceted to the contemporary Indian standard, “to preserve weight at the expense of symmetry and brilliance,” this was a fairly drastic job. The stone was slimmed down to approximately 69 carats, into a shield-shaped brilliant. Colbert named it the Diamant Bleu de la Couronne (Blue Diamond of the Crown), and the stone would subsequently become known simply as the French Blue.[10] It would remain in this form until the arrival of the French Revolution brought with it the beginning of a new and uncertain chapter.
That began in September 1792, when the Garde-Meuble (Royal Storehouse), whose contents had been turned over to the Revolutionary government the previous year, was ransacked. During what turned out to be nearly a week of nightly looting, one of the greatest robberies in the world unfolded. The French Crown Jewels, confiscated from the Crown during the chaos of the French Revolution, were gone. While the majority were recovered in the weeks and months that followed, the French Blue was not, and it would never be seen in the same form again. In fact, it does not reappear in any reliable record until 1812, when it was documented in the possession of a London diamond merchant, Daniel Eliason, having been cut down again to its present weight (excepting a little later repolishing).[11]
It was probably Eliason who sold it to the diamond’s next confirmed owner, and the one to whom the gem owes its current name, the banker Henry Philip Hope. This financier may have been renowned as “munificent in his charities,”[12] but he was also a seasoned gem connoisseur who knew how to drive a hard bargain. One account of the sale has him writing out a check and putting it on the table along with his watch, telling Eliason that the offer would only stand for five minutes. The dealer accepted, complaining that he was getting the prize “dog cheap.”[13] Hope perhaps knew that Eliason had been hawking the gem around Europe without success, and reportedly closed the deal for little more than a third of the original asking price. If the purchase did indeed take place on these terms, it portended a future for the Hope in which it would repeatedly be haggled over and sold in contentious or distressed financial circumstances. Hope’s legatees, his three nephews, fought a lengthy court battle in the 1840s to establish which of them would inherit the diamond, while the family’s final owner—Lord Francis Hope—flogged it in 1901 to help service his heavy debts.
Its next notable guardian, nearly a decade later, was the house of Cartier. Having opened its first New York store months earlier, Pierre Cartier sought out the Hope as a signature purchase to help put his firm on the map with high-rolling American clients. One already known to him was the heiress and socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean, who had both inherited and married into wealth. She was the daughter of Thomas Walsh, an Irish immigrant who became one of the era’s most successful gold miners, prompting the title of her memoir, Father Struck It Rich. Evalyn cemented the family’s newfound wealth and social status by marrying Ned McLean, heir to a publishing empire that included The Washington Post. With two fortunes at their disposal, the McLeans lived and spent seemingly without limits. They had already bought one outrageously expensive diamond from Cartier—the 94.75-carat Star of the East—while honeymooning in Paris in 1908 (“I need no guide to find that place,” Evalyn later wrote of the jeweler’s flagship boutique on rue de la Paix).[14] Now they were being lined up as potential buyers for the Hope.
Pierre Cartier knew his customers, and he courted them assiduously, arranging to meet but without disclosing the treasure he had to offer them. “His manner was exquisitely mysterious,” McLean recalled in her memoir. “I suppose a Parisian jewel merchant who seeks to trade among the ultra-rich has to be more or less a stage manager and an actor. Certainly he must be one great salesman.”[15] Cartier did not disappoint: without opening his wax-sealed parcel to reveal the treasure contained within, he launched into an extensive and often fictitious account of the stone that had been the French Blue and become the Hope Diamond.[*7] [16] He recounted how Tavernier had “stolen the gem from a Hindu, perhaps a Hindu God” and subsequently met an unfortunate end, torn apart by wild dogs; how Marie Antoinette had worn it before her untimely date with the guillotine; how the Hope family fortune had dwindled under its spell; and how a subsequent owner—the Turkish diamond dealer Selim Habib—had drowned at sea after selling the gem. This intricate tapestry of truth and legend achieved its desired effect: a dealer who had come with something to sell now had a customer champing at the bit to view the goods. “Let me see the thing,” McLean finally exclaimed to Cartier, who apparently waited a full minute—“as a concert pianist may do before striking trained fingers to the keys of his instrument”—before finally revealing it.[17]
Despite having enticed his client with this intricate sales pitch, she turned him down. “Ned—I don’t want the thing. I don’t like the setting,” she declared. Cartier was not so easily deterred. He had the Hope remounted onto a diamond necklace and pressed her to spend a few days with it, correctly betting that familiarity would breed content. The gambit was successful, and the McLeans agreed to purchase the diamond—a transaction that would be far from straightforward. A price of $180,000 (roughly $5.5 million today) was agreed and a contract signed, but weeks passed with no initial payment being made. Then Evalyn tried to back out of the deal altogether, under pressure from her mother-in-law, who insisted she return the “cursed stone.”[18] Cartier eventually had to resort to lawyers to ensure his clients complied with the contract they had signed. It was over a year before the matter was settled, and the delays combined with legal fees left the firm out of pocket. Cartier had been caught out by his own “curse.”
For Evalyn Walsh McLean, her ownership of the diamond only seemed to confirm its connection to misfortune. Although she claimed that “I like to pretend the thing brings good luck,” in the years that followed her marriage collapsed and her husband died in a psychiatric facility, one son was fatally hit by a car, her daughter died of a drug overdose, Evalyn herself was defrauded by a con artist who fleeced her of $100,000, and her finances became so strained at one point that she had to pawn the Hope. The diamond was reclaimed and remained in her ownership until her death in 1947, but it was then sold along with the rest of her jewelry to New York jeweler Harry Winston to help cover her estate’s debts.
Evalyn had bought the Hope Diamond partly because of its twisted history, and she appeared to have become a poster child for the idea that it was in fact cursed. Although many of the Hope’s owners seemed to meet with misfortune in one way or another,[*8] some of the best stories in the stone’s supposedly ill-starred history fall apart on cursory inspection. The founding legend—that Tavernier brought about the curse by stealing the diamond from an idol in a Hindu temple, and was subsequently savaged by dogs—was preposterous: he was a highly respectable trader of long standing who lived to the ripe old age of eighty-four.[19] Nor was the line that Cartier spun about Marie Antoinette having worn the stone at all likely, since it was mounted in the ceremonial Order of the Golden Fleece at the time.[20] The tale of the Turkish diamond dealer drowned at sea was a case of mistaken identity: it was a different man with the same name who went down on the ill-fated paddle steamer. The story of the curse is one that liberally mixes fabrication in with fact, and lumps together those who actually possessed the stone with those who almost certainly never touched it.
Still the curse story persisted—then and now—because there is some part of us that wishes to believe it, or at least to entertain it. When Pierre Cartier had tantalized Evalyn Walsh McLean with a heady cocktail of sparkling history, seductive anecdotes, and entertaining speculation about the Hope, she both recognized the game being played and could not help herself from participating in it. “Do I believe a lot of silly superstitions, legends of the diamond? I must confess I know better and yet, knowing better, I believe.”[21] She ensured that her children never touched the Hope and at one point even took it to a Catholic priest to be blessed (appropriately enough, a storm descended as he did so, lightning splitting a tree in half).[22]
Her behavior is eloquent about the effect of such stories on our psychology, and how they can become such an important part of the desirability of gemstones. Aesthetic quality and associations with famous past owners may be attraction enough. But there is also a magnetism in mystery: the question of where a stone really came from, in whose hands it has actually been held, and if it could truly carry a power beyond beauty. Like the tendrils of a weed, these thoughts are hard to banish once planted. They are pondered, even without being fully believed. And over time, as coincidence piles up on happenstance, they add a layer of sheen to a gemstone that even months of dogged polishing cannot.
When Evalyn Walsh McLean was examining the Hope Diamond for the first time, she found herself both enticed and wrong-footed by its color. “The blue of it is something I am puzzled to name,” she later wrote. “Peking blue would be too dark, West Point blue too gray. A Hussar’s coat? Delft? A harbor blue?”[23] She is not the only one to have looked at a colored diamond and to have felt that they were experiencing something novel and almost indescribable. The hue of these diamonds is central to their aura—entrancing because they are not just beautiful but also unfamiliar and somehow intangible. So it is appropriate that these colors should have come variously from more profound and mysterious origins than other gemstones. The story of how diamonds got their color is one that takes us deeper into the earth’s layers than any other gemstone, and whose details geologists continue to puzzle over.
In the case of blue diamonds, we know that the color comes from boron, but the difficulty arises from the fact that this element—which is abundant at the surface of the earth—barely exists at the depth where diamonds form. Because gemmologists rely on inclusions to deduce the origin of gemstones, and in colored diamonds these have often been eliminated by the cutter where they even existed in the first place, for a long time it proved impossible to establish where exactly these enigmatic gems had emerged. Only in 2018 did a study of forty-six blue diamonds with inclusions shed some light on this mystery.[24] The minerals they contained helped researchers to deduce that these diamonds had formed even farther down than previously believed—as deep as the earth’s lower mantle, 400 miles below the surface, compared to the 95- to 125-mile depth at which diamonds are typically known to form. The boron that gave them their color is thought to have been carried down all that way by pieces of the ocean floor that had undergone subduction. The high heat and pressure of the lower mantle then melted this rock, releasing the element that colors the diamond blue. These remarkably rare gems, therefore, were brought to us by one of the earth’s most magnificent roller-coaster rides: the great descent of whole chunks of ocean, a precursor to the ascent that brought the diamonds exploding to the surface.
When it comes to wild and wonderful origin stories, blue diamonds must share the limelight. The pinks have a curious story of their own, their tone arising not from any mineral intervention but from a quirk of structure. Here heat and pressure do all the work, stretching the bonds between a diamond’s carbon atoms in a process known as plastic deformation. The diamond’s structure is effectively squashed out of shape, not unlike the effect of squeezing a pack of playing cards until they each slide out from under one another: a physical defect capable of causing a beautiful anomaly. Depending on the type and origin of the diamond, this process can create colors ranging from the pale pink of the Agra or Darya-i-Noor, to the incredibly rare red, and others that cover a spectrum of orange and brown tints.
Greens, too, share a weird physical fault. Their color is caused by radiation, which knocks the carbon atoms out of place in the crystal structure, also altering the light absorption. While this can occur within the earth, artificially irradiated stones are far more common. The natural process is so difficult to distinguish from man-made irradiation treatments that, unless the levels are off the scale, it can at times be almost impossible to distinguish a genuine green from an irradiated stone.[*9] The most valuable greens, such as the Dresden Green, are those known to pre-date the invention of laboratory-induced irradiation.
What unites these various processes is how unusual they are. While diamonds are not a rare gemstone, those containing color make up a minuscule fraction of the total. The GIA estimates that they represent just one in every 10,000 carats of fashioned diamonds in existence. Those with what it calls an intense color are even rarer: one in 25,000.[25] For most of their history, this meant that colored diamonds were vanishingly rare finds, secreted into the safes and treasuries of the most exclusive collectors. There was no mainstream market in them because they simply did not exist in any meaningful number, appearing anomalously in diamond mines ranging from India and South Africa to Brazil, Russia, and Tanzania.
One unusual deposit is the exception that proves the rule. In 1979 a diamond pipe was discovered in Western Australia that would become the Argyle Mine. For the first time, a reliable source of colored diamonds had been unearthed: according to one report from 2001, just 27 percent of the diamonds emerging from this mine were colorless or pale yellow, whereas 72 percent were brown and the remaining 1 percent a mixture of blue, green, and predominantly pink stones.[26] For pinks in particular, this marked a revolution. Even as such a small proportion of the total deposit, they were now being extracted with unprecedented regularity. While still extremely rare, they started to become, for the first time in history, available. Argyle pinks (and even some reds) created a high-end market of their own, a competitive arena for a handful of committed collectors with the means to match their interest.
Although Argyle was not producing large enough gems to enter the international auction headlines, its existence certainly supported the rise of pinks on their upward trajectory. Between 2012 and 2022 five of the ten most expensive gemstones ever sold under the hammer have been pink diamonds, at prices ranging from $39.3 million to $71.2 million. The price of pinks experienced a steady surge as stones from the Argyle Mine started to come onto the market, then as those that had been sitting in safes for years emerged to catch the rising tide, and finally as it became known that the Argyle Mine was preparing to shut down, which it finally did in 2020. Jaw-dropping amounts were expended: in 2015 the Chinese billionaire Joseph Lau parted with $28.5 million to buy a vivid pink diamond at Christie’s for his seven-year-old daughter, naming it the Sweet Josephine. At Sotheby’s, the very next day, he bid $48.4 million for a 12.03-carat vivid blue, which became the Blue Moon of Josephine, also taking her name.[27]
Pinks did not pioneer this colored-diamond extravaganza alone. While Argyle’s brown diamonds were considerably more abundant and less desirable, the mine’s promoters nevertheless applied artful marketing to add luster to a previously unloved variety. Brown became “champagne,” “cognac,” and “chocolate,” and the category later benefited from celebrity endorsers including the actress Scarlett Johansson, who chose one for her engagement ring.
More valuable are the yellow diamonds whose nitrogen content gives them a sufficiently strong color to be distinguished from those regarded as a subset of the colorless diamond. Although these are the most common of colored diamonds, there are some famous and stunning examples. Foremost among them is the Tiffany Diamond, a 128.54-carat yellow that emerged from South Africa in 1877, distinguished by the fact that just four women have ever worn it—Mary Whitehouse (the wife of an American diplomat), Audrey Hepburn, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga. Colored-diamond king Laurence Graff has also been a consistent promoter of yellows. Since buying the 47.39-carat Star of Bombay in 1974, a historic stone from the Golconda mines, he has brought a long succession of these diamonds to market and has helped to drive up their popularity and price: in 2014 he achieved a $16.3-million price for the Graff Vivid Yellow, a 100.09-carat diamond that had come from a rough almost twice as large.[28]
The continued rise of the colored diamond owes much to the sophistication of the modern jewelry industry. Advances in mining have seen larger specimens recovered in recent years. Expertise in cutting means that these unmatchable stones, with their peerless interplay of color and brilliance, can now be seen in their best possible light. Although some of these facelifts have been controversial, they also prove the near alchemy involved in cutting a stone to change not only its shape but its actual color. In turn, the astute marketing that has been part of the diamond’s story since the mid-twentieth century has been hard at work in uplifting the less obviously attractive of the fancy varieties.
These market forces have driven the popularity of a stone that is perhaps the most remarkable natural creation of all—the apex gemstone that combines richness of color with the diamond’s enrapturing reaction to light. The colored diamond is an extraordinarily rare and truly remarkable object. But it also speaks to universal truths about gemstones—commodity objects whose worth can never be wholly financial or entirely quantifiable by normal measures. While flows of capital help to define the direction of prices, aesthetics, history, and emotional resonance are the factors that ultimately enshrine value.
At the start of my career in the auction business, I learned to value gems with my head, using price-per-carat benchmarks. The more I watched experienced dealers, the more I realized that the best make equal use of gut and heart. While you must know what the material is worth functionally, you also need to be able to intuit what it will mean to people. You have to be confident that, if you have fallen in love with a stone, others will too. Even allowing for differences in individual taste and cultural preference, there is a surprising degree of overlap in what attracts people to these objects. The emotions spurred by the beauty of a gorgeous gem, the associations ingrained in its color, and the attraction created by its story are so often universal. And if you want to understand how these factors can drive simple lumps of carbon to unimaginable heights of value, then you need look no further than the inscrutable, unbelievable, and often near-unattainable marvel that is the colored diamond. It is the gemstone that both stands alone in quality and tells the human story of why these objects are so widely loved and pursued—as symbols of love, slices of history, and sources of a fascination that feel as eternal as the diamond itself.