Pink diamond breaks record to become most expensive sold at auction

A pink diamond has been sold for an absolutely whopping sum in Hong Kong, setting a world record for the highest price per carat for a diamond sold at auction.

Of course, diamonds are never cheap - but the Williamson Pink Star diamond has taken things to a whole different level.

The 11.15-carat Williamson Pink Star diamond, auctioned by Sotheby's Hong Kong, was originally estimated at £18.9 million.

However, it ended up massively surpassing this estimate.

Guy Bell / Alamy Stock Photo

At an auction on Friday (7 October), it sold for £44.9 million (392 million Hong Kong dollars/$49.78).

The Williamson Pink Star draws its name from two legendary pink diamonds.

The first is the 23.60-carat Williamson diamond which was presented to the late Queen Elizabeth as a wedding gift in 1947, while the second is the 59.60-carat Pink Star diamond that sold for a record £64 million at auction in 2017.

The Williamson Pink Star is the second-largest pink diamond to appear at auction. 

Pink diamonds are among the rarest and most valuable of the coloured diamonds.

"When you consider an alluring link to Queen Elizabeth, the rising prices for pink diamonds thanks to their increasing rarity, and the backdrop of an unstable global economy, this diamond could prove to be a very compelling proposal for the right person," said Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds.

"Hard assets such as world-class diamonds have a history of performing well.

"Some of the world's highest quality diamonds have seen prices double over the last 10 years."

There were initially numerous bidders in the auction, but as prices rose, this was whittled down to one person in the room and two phone bidders.

When the hammer eventually went down, there was applause in the room - though the winner has not been named.

Guy Bell / Alamy Stock Photo

Wenhao Yu, chairman of Jewellery and Watches at Sotheby's Asia, told Forbes prior to the sale that the cushion-shaped diamond 'has the best qualities you can have in a pink diamond', and compared it to a work of art.

"It's luck to find this kind of diamond that was formed underground for millions of years, and it takes a great amount of art and creativity to fashion it into a gorgeous stone with so many exceptional qualities," he said.

Fine art brokers Sotheby's described the diamond as 'a perfectly brilliant display of imperfection'.

"While nitrogen and boron are responsible for the vivid hues of yellow and blue diamonds respectively, there is no evidence that pink diamonds receive their colour from trace elements," Sotheby's said.

"Rather, the crystal structure of the stone selectively absorbs light as a result of an idiosyncratic lattice defect, which results in an unusual arrangement of atoms in the crystal.

"These happy anomalies occasionally cause pink graining in the diamond crystal – a perfectly brilliant display of imperfection."