GREEN WITH ENVY

Coloured diamonds, in particular the rare greenhued stones, are increasingly gaining favour among collectors and investors.

Beautifully crafted in the style of a glittering three-dimensional astrolabe or celestial object d’art, De Beers’ Wondrous Sphere incorporates 476 polished and rough diamonds placed on orbiting white gold rings articulated around a 13.17-carat olive green rough diamond. That centre diamond took De Beers ( www.debeers.com) chief diamond buyer Andrew Coxon nine months to find. Coxon is also the president of the De Beers Institute of Diamonds.

“The design required a rough diamond of stature and beauty,” he explains, adding the diamond would have probably gone straight to the polishing wheel if he hadn’t “rescued” it.

Natural vivid green diamonds are the second-rarest diamonds to be found naturally — fancy red diamonds being the rarest — says Coxon, who has bought and sold some of the world’s most famous and largest diamonds. They include the 59.60-carat CTF Pink that came from a 132.5-carat rough diamond mined by De Beers in 1999 and which was bought by jewellery retailer Chow Tai Fook at Sotheby’s Hong Kong last April, setting a new world auction record for any diamond at US$71.2 million (S$94.9 million) or US$1.19 million a carat.

In 2016, Chow Tai Fook set the auction world record for a fancy vivid green diamond when it bought Aurora Green for US$16.8 million or US$3.3 million per carat.At 5.03 carats, Aurora Green was a fraction of the size of CTF Pink yet achieved a much higher per carat price. It was also the largest fancy vivid green diamond sold at auction, attesting to the rarity of the most sought-after