Rare diamond sells for 52 million pounds in Hong Kong auction

Sotheby’s in Hong Kong sold an extremely rare pink diamond for 453m Hong Kong dollars, approximately 52m pounds. The diamond, which has a link to Queen Elizabeth II, fetched more than double its estimate.

Called the Williamson Pink Star, it is one of the world’s purest, most saturated pink diamonds at 11.15 carats. By standards, it is the 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 cut into a dazzling cushion-cut, bringing out the diamond’s innermost beauty to full display.

According to Sotheby’s, precious metals and gemstones are nature's finest miracles not simply because of their beauty and rarity, but also because their inherent and enduring properties can offer a tangible link across successive generations.

To give insight into the diamond's rarity, Sotheby's states of all the diamonds submitted to the GIA (the Gemological Institute of America, considered the world's leading geological research institute), less than 3 percent are classified as coloured diamonds, and less than 5 percent of those are considered predominantly pink.

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 percent weighed less than 1 carat.