5.3 Carats Deep Blue Diamond Sold for $9.6 Million – New World Record

April 28th, 2013 by Noam Flint

We’ve been expecting the sale of this magnificent blue diamond for almost two months – and it was certainly worth the wait.

1965 Bulgari Blue Diamond Ring Sold by Bonhams1965 Bulgari Blue Diamond Ring Sold by Bonhams (picture Bonhams)

Bonhams, the privately owned British auction house, has made its headlines this week by passing all diamond auctions records previously held by commonly known auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

In fact, it simply passed every sale there was by setting a new world record for a price per carat paid for a blue diamond – $1,800,000 per carat ($1.8 Million Dollars).

Here is the auction’s preliminary video for this magnificent diamond:

The gem is an extremely rare cushion cut fancy deep blue diamond weighing 5.30 carat with vs2 clarity. It is mounted onto a “Trombino” ring made by Bulgari back in the 1960′s.

Amazingly, Bonhams price estimation for this blue diamond was in between $1,550,000 and $2,300,000 (total), which was what eventually paid per carat – bringing it to a total price of $9,600,000 ($9.6 million dollars).

You can watch the world record being set live at the auction:

The buyer for this deep blue is no other than Graff Diamonds. For those of you who’ve been following our blog for the past year, it seems that every other post begins with these two lines:

“New world record for blue / pink diamond is broken”, and the line that immediately follows: “the buyer of the record breaking diamond is Graff Diamonds”.

Here are a couple of remainders from the pieces he bought lately:

Back in December 2012 Graff bought a 6.54 carat Intense Pink Diamond that for $8.59 million dollars. And just before, during November 2012, he bought the astounding (previously record owner) 10.48 carat Deep blue diamond for 10.86 million.

An interesting purchase which we referred to as a $10,000,000 bet since he intends to re-polish it into a 7 carat vivid blue.

One last question… Since Graff is a diamond dealer, how much would you figure this diamond’s retail price would be?