Geneva– The 5.5-carat triangular-cut diamond, known as the largest fancy vivid blue-green diamond ever found, sold for more than 13.5 million Swiss francs ($17.3 million) on Wednesday, Christie’s said, calling it a record price for a stone of its kind sold at auction.
“Ocean Dream”, the extraordinary offering in the auction house’s Geneva jewelery sale, was found in Central Africa in the 1990s. The price easily topped the pre-sale estimate of achieving 7–10 million francs (about $9–13 million).
Rahul Kadakia, president of Christie’s Asia Pacific, said an unspecified private client was the buyer, and it took about 20 minutes for the stone to sell – a sign that interest was high.
Its price was more than double the $8.5 million it was worth, which was displayed among rare colored diamonds in the Smithsonian’s Splendor of Diamonds exhibition in 2003, which was sold at Christie’s in 2014.
“A spectacular result worthy of the world’s rarest blue-green diamond,” Tobias Kormind, managing director of online jeweler 77 Diamonds, said in a statement.
A six-carat fancy brilliant blue diamond failed to sell at a Sotheby’s auction in Geneva on Tuesday.
The rare stone from South Africa’s famous Cullinan mine came with a pre-sale estimate of 7.2 million to 9.6 million francs ($9.2 million to $12.3 million), the auction house said.
“Although the diamond did not find a buyer during the auction, we are now in talks with a number of interested parties and are confident it will soon find a new home,” Sotheby’s said in a statement.
Both houses say collectors are increasingly attracted to rare, colored diamonds, which account for only a fraction of all diamonds mined worldwide.
