Rare Blue Diamond gets $ 21.5 mn at a gin auction

An exceptionally rare blue diamond was under the hammer in Geneva on Tuesday night, selling for $ 21.5 million, Sotheby's Sublast House said.

“The Mediterranean blue”, an elegant vivid blue diamond that weighed 10.3 carats with an estimated value of $ 20 million, attracted an intense bidding battle.

The tender began in nine million Swiss francs ($ 10.8 million), with a fierce round trip before the diamond was finally sold to a private collector from the United States, whose name did not occur, for 17.9 million francs ($ 21.5 million), Sotheby's said.

The Mediterranean blue, which is a new blue diamond recently extracted from the legendary mines of Cullinan in South Africa, generated a great emotion within the diamond industry since it was announced for the first time in March, said the auction house.

Before its final presentation in Geneva on Tuesday, it was presented as part of a Sotheby debut exhibition in Abu Dhabi last month, where it was exhibited along with seven other “extraordinary” diamonds and collectively precise precious stones with a value of more than $ 100 million.

“In the upper part of the rarity pyramid are the blue diamonds,” said Quig Bruning, head of Sotheby's jewelry in North America, Europe and the Middle East, in the Abu Dhabi show.

After serving as a auctioneer in Tuesday, he praised the gem as “without a doubt the defining stone of the season”, saying in a statement that “is among the best blue diamonds we have sold.”

Tobias Kormind, head of the largest online diamond jeweler in Europe, 77 diamonds, was less optimistic, describing the sale as “less dazzling than expected.”

“The diamond exceeded its estimate of $ 20 million, which suggests that there was a significant interest,” he acknowledged.

“But the broadest uncertainty, including commercial US-china tensions, may have damping dessert confidence and silence what could have been a more frantic atmosphere.”