“The Rock,” an egg-sized white diamond billed as the largest of its kind to go up for auction, sold for more than 21.6 million Swiss francs ($21.75 million) including fees, according to Christie’s, though at the lower end of the estimated range.
With its platinum pendant setting, the 228-carat pear-shaped G-Color stone weighs 61.3 grams (2.2 ounces) and measures 5.4 centimeters by 3.1 centimeters (2.1 inches by 1.2 inches) — about the size of a medium hen’s egg.
G-Color is the fourth letter rung below the top-grade D-Color diamonds, not the highest.
The Rock was purchased by an anonymous private buyer for a pre-auction estimate of between 19 million and 30 million francs.
Christie’s Geneva’s head of jewelry, Max Fawcett, hailed a successful sale in “uncharted territory” for a stone of this type.
The “Red Cross” diamond, a 205.1-carat fancy yellow stone, also went under the hammer for about 14.2 million francs, more than double the pre-sale estimate. The diamond was cut from a rough stone discovered in the Griqualand mines of South Africa in the early twentieth century, and it was auctioned for the first time in 1918.
Fawcett testified that the Red Cross diamond had sparked “huge amount of interest,” and that an unspecified “7-figure sum” from the sale proceeds would be donated to the international Red Cross Movement, a Geneva-based humanitarian aid organization.
