A fancy vivid pink diamond just shy of 19 carats—formerly known as the Pink Legacy diamond—was sold to US-based Harry Winston for 50.4 million Swiss francs ($50.2 million) last night (Nov. 13) in Geneva. According to a press release from Christie’s auction house, the bidding lasted only five minutes before it was declared the most expensive pink diamond ever sold at auction, weighing in at over $2.6 million per carat.
The diamond’s cost beat the previous world record for a pink diamond, which sold last year for over $2.1 million per carat in Hong Kong.
The Pink Legacy diamond was previously owned by the Oppenheimer family—which led the diamond-mining behemoth De Beers for a century—and has been reimagined as the “Winston Pink Legacy” by its new owners. The diamond itself was reportedly found in a South African mine a century ago and was cut in 1920. According to Christie’s, Fancy Vivid Pink diamonds—as classified by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA)—are “virtually unheard of—in over 250 years of auction history at Christie’s, only four such stones have ever appeared for sale.”
As the supply for high-quality colored diamonds becomes increasingly limited, demand has increased, pushing the price of the stones up dramatically. It’s a trend that appears to be continuing, despite a growing synthetic diamond market.