Alisa Moussaieff was in her London office on May 14, having lunch and bidding over the phone on a 6.24-carat deep blue diamond ring at Christie’s in Geneva. Within minutes she had won it with a $12.7 million offer, a record price per carat for a deep blue diamond and well beyond the $5.4 million low estimate.
“It was a sensible price,” Mrs. Moussaieff said in a recent phone interview. The 96-year-old, who owns the family jewelry business, has been buying and selling diamonds and gemstones for more than 60 years and is considered an industry authority.
“This diamond is the most beautiful deep ocean blue,” she said. “We haven’t seen anything like this since 2013, when there was a very fine deep blue diamond at auction, but not quite as nice as this.” And, she added, she already has had two calls from interested buyers.
The diamond’s sale was among a handful of multimillion-dollar transactions involving colored diamonds in the past 12 months. On June 17, Christie’s New York sold the Marie-Thérèse Pink, a 10.38-carat purple-pink diamond, for $14 million.
Of course the diamond’s back story was likely to have contributed to the result. It belonged to a long list of royals, likely including Marie Antoinette — and it is known to have been owned by Marie Antoinette’s elder daughter, Marie-Thérèse, Duchess of Angoulême. More recently, it was reset in its current fleur-de-lis ring design by Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the exclusive Parisian jewelry maker best known as JAR.
In June 2024, Christie’s sold the Eden Rose, a 10.20-carat fancy intense pink diamond in a starburst ring design, for $13.3 million. (Fancy intense is a color saturation category in the Gemological Institute of America’s gem grading system; fancy vivid is used for the most saturated color.)
Other auction houses have had similar sales results. At Sotheby’s Geneva, colored diamond sales have included the Mediterranean Blue, a 10.03-carat fancy vivid blue diamond, which sold in May for $21.5 million, and a 7-carat fancy intense purplish-pink diamond, sold in December for $3.4 million.
And at Phillips, its top sales last year were nine colored diamonds, including a 6.21-carat fancy vivid pink ring for $12 million and the Argyle Phoenix, a 1.56-carat red diamond, which the London jeweler Laurence Graff bought for $4.2 million.
Colored diamonds, particularly high-quality blues and pinks, have always commanded top dollar. But the recent action at the auctions and among high-end dealers indicates that — as often happens in times of turmoil — gems are seen as safe repositories of wealth.
After all, you can’t put real estate or artworks in a pocket.
“In today’s more turbulent environment,” said Caroline Morrissey, the head of jewelry at Bonhams in New York, “people with significant buying power are looking at jewelry as a place to store their money away from the stock market because it can be perceived as safer and more lucrative over a period of time.”
Sale Strategy
A series of multimillion-dollar sales catches the attention of potential sellers, who may be holding onto stones for the right moment, said Rahul Kadakia, the international head of jewelry at Christie’s. He added that clients who purchased colored diamonds in the 1970s and 1980s now would see that their stones “are 10, 20 and 50 times more valuable.”
High sale prices do inspire owners to consider selling, said Quig Bruning, Sotheby’s head of jewels for the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa. The night after the Mediterranean Blue sale, he recalled during a recent interview, a man approached him in a hotel bar in Geneva and said he had a blue diamond to sell. “When you have a good auction moment,” he said, “in the immediate aftermath, people inevitably want to have a conversation about consigning.”
But auction houses don’t expect to be offered multiple gems — fancy colored diamonds remain among the scarcest gems in the world.
Over the past 20 years, just 0.4 percent of all natural diamonds graded by the GIA have been fancy colors, the organization said. A diamond’s color is the result of trace elements trapped in the crystal (tiny amounts of boron give rise to blue tones, for example) or when geological pressure shifted the stone’s atomic structure altering how light is reflected (which creates pink tones).
And as scarce as they are, sizes larger than 10 carats are even more rare. “When you see colored diamonds in 10-carat sizes and up, well that is almost unheard-of,” Mr. Kadakia said.
Collectors recognize that rarity, which is why a stone such as the Bleu Royal, a 17.61-carat fancy vivid blue diamond in a platinum and 18-karat rose gold diamond-accented ring, sold for $44 million at Christie’s in November 2023.
Bubble or Blip?
Are the recent sales results a bubble in the colored diamond market? Experts say no. “I don’t think it is blip because the prices have maintained and will probably go up,” Ms. Morrissey of Bonhams said.
Symbolic & Chase, a dealer of high-end stones and vintage jewels in London, has been seeing more interest in colored diamonds from both existing and new collectors, according to its owner, Martin Travis: “Most of these clients are focused on the beauty in the stone rather than ‘investment.’ That said, historical and current price is always discussed before such items are purchased, so investment is a factor.”
And in recent years, houses such as Tiffany & Company have increased their investment in colored diamonds to offer V.I.P. clients something not easily found elsewhere.
In 2022, for example, Tiffany acquired 35 of the last stones taken from the Argyle Diamond Mine in Western Australia, the world’s main source of pink diamonds until it was depleted and closed in 2020. Nearly all the stones, which ranged from 0.35 carats to 1.51 carats and included the Argyle Red, have been sold, according to an email from Victoria Reynolds, the house’s chief gemologist.
In addition to those Argyle diamonds, she wrote, “We have seen increased sales and interest from clients all over the world in red, vivid orange, blue and green-blue diamonds, specifically in sizes over a carat.”
The house showcases its colored diamonds at private viewings and during its annual Blue Book events, where a client can select a stone and work with a Tiffany designer to create a custom piece. “The client who owns them becomes part of a very rarefied club,” Ms. Reynolds noted, “as there are so few of these exceptional diamonds in the world.”
Most private collectors buying colored diamonds have already had an interest or purchased other rare colored precious stones, said Mr. Travis of Symbolic & Chase.
“Colored diamonds seem to be a natural progression,” he added, “the ultimate stone.”
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