Why Buyers Are Spending Millions on Colored Diamonds

New York Times

21 hours ago

Alisa Moussaieff was in her London office on May 14, having lunch and bidding over the phone on a 6.24-carat deep blue diamond ring at Christie's in Geneva. Within minutes she had won it with a $12.7 million offer, a record price per carat for a deep blue diamond and well beyond the $5.4 million low estimate.
'It was a sensible price,' Mrs. Moussaieff said in a recent phone interview. The 96-year-old, who owns the family jewelry business, has been buying and selling diamonds and gemstones for more than 60 years and is considered an industry authority.
'This diamond is the most beautiful deep ocean blue,' she said. 'We haven't seen anything like this since 2013, when there was a very fine deep blue diamond at auction, but not quite as nice as this.' And, she added, she already has had two calls from interested buyers.
The diamond's sale was among a handful of multimillion-dollar transactions involving colored diamonds in the past 12 months. On June 17, Christie's New York sold the Marie-Thérèse Pink, a 10.38-carat purple-pink diamond, for $14 million.
Of course the diamond's back story was likely to have contributed to the result. It belonged to a long list of royals, likely including Marie Antoinette — and it is known to have been owned by Marie Antoinette's elder daughter, Marie-Thérèse, Duchess of Angoulême. More recently, it was reset in its current fleur-de-lis ring design by Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the exclusive Parisian jewelry maker best known as JAR.
In June 2024, Christie's sold the Eden Rose, a 10.20-carat fancy intense pink diamond in a starburst ring design, for $13.3 million. (Fancy intense is a color saturation category in the Gemological Institute of America's gem grading system; fancy vivid is used for the most saturated color.)
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