Pink diamonds are hot items for the rich. This year a pink diamond set a world record by selling for $71.2 million in a Hong Kong auction.
Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds, talked about colored diamond sales.
“That red was the rarest colour and then you’ve got your greens and oranges and blues and pinks. And actually what we’ve seen over the last 10 years is pinks have outperformed blue. So pinks have returned about 300 percent over the last 10 years, while blues performed about 200 percent, and the reason for that is, I think, there’s just greater demand. Even though there’s a larger supply, there’s greater demand for the pinks than they are for the blues. And the same thing can be said about. …We had recently an auction where the ‘Oppenheimer Blue’ broke a record – but then was subsequently [beaten] with the ‘Pink Star’ star – $57.5 five million dollars for a 14 carat vivid blue, exceptional stone. A couple of years before that you had an orange stone which was 13 carats, so a more rare stone, and it only managed to achieve $36 million dollars. And I think the reason for that is simply that consumers have stated a preference for certain colours and there is greater demand, and like most things in life, supply and demand also plays a very important part.”
Ninety percent of the world’s pink diamonds come from Argyle mine in western Australia. But even their pink diamonds are rare finds among the other types of diamonds.
Colored diamonds are a result of the lattice structure that occurs when the diamond forms.
