Shine a light through a prism and you get a rainbow, shine a light on a cut diamond and you will get sparkle and dazzle, but no rainbow. However, diamonds come in an assortment of rainbow colors. In fact over 300 shades of naturally colored diamonds have been identified, ranging from white to black, and everything in between. Diamonds attain their color through the chemical processes that take place while under the pressures of carbon crystallization ranging over millions of years. There are few to no truly colorless diamonds. In fact some of the world’s most well-known and famous diamonds are colored diamonds:
The Hope Diamond is a deep-blue sapphire colored diamond currently housed at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. It is just as equally known for its size, color and quality as it “colored” history full of legend and curses.
The Green Dresden is a truly green stone. This alone, apart from size makes it remarkably valuable, as the polishing of a rough green stone usually diminishes the green tones. The “Green Dresden” however retains a remarkably distinct green coloration. It was stolen by the Soviets at the end of World War II, but returned in 1958. Today it is housed in the Albertinium Museum in Dresden.
Motion picture fans will probably recognize the Pumpkin Diamond. It’s a vivid orange five and a half carat stone set for actress Halle Berry, who wore it the night of her Academy Award win for Best Actress. The stone is so unique that it is valued at over $3 million. Fans of the Oscars may have also noticed actress Maria Menounos when she donned a champagne-diamond dress and shoes worth over $2.5 million to the famous awards ceremony in 2004.
Anyone who traces the history of diamonds will quickly come across the name of Tavernier. John-Baptiste Tavernier who brought back not only the first detailed accounts of diamond mines in India, but also some of the most famous colored stones in history. He is connected to the Koh-i-Noor and the Hope Diamond as well as the lovely and incredibly rare Darya-i Nur or “Sea of Light”, a pale pink diamond of remarkable purity.
Of course no list of famous diamonds would be complete without a mention of the Tiffany Diamond, a 129 carat cushion shape diamond. It is a canary yellow diamond, and while white diamonds with a yellow hue tend to be of lower value, the intensity of the coloration of the “Tiffany Diamond” makes it incredibly valuable both for color and size.
The largest diamond ever discovered in the United States was a natural colored diamond of pale brown, the Uncle Sam Diamond found in what is now the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas. The 40 carat stone was emerald-cut in 1971 and sold for approximately $150,000.
The largest black diamond in the world is the Spirit of de Grisogono, and is believed to be the world’s fifth largest diamond overall. The diamond currently weighs 312 carats and is set in a white gold ring with 702 smaller white diamonds surrounding it.
But not all colored diamonds of renown are set in jewelry. The Aurora Collection of colored stones contains 296 stones of remarkable quality and of every color in the natural colored diamond spectrum. The collection has traveled to several museums for long-term display and currently resides in London’s Natural History Museum.
Another unique display of colored diamonds occurred at during the Smithsonian’s exhibit entitled “The Splendor of Diamonds” in 2003. The exhibit showed the world’s finest red diamond, the Moussaieff Red along with the DeBeers white Millennium Star and its incredibly vivid blue Heart of Eternity.
It is only in recent history that colored diamonds have attained commercial popularity equaling that of white diamonds. Some of the world’s diamond distributors in the world currently do not promote colored diamonds because of their scarcity.
The increase in attention and popularity of colored diamonds can be attested to by the fact that most of the highest-priced and valuable diamonds in the world are fancy color diamonds. Out of all colored diamonds, red is the scarcest of all. The famous Hancock Red sold in the late 1980s for over $800,000 which gave it the record at the time for the highest price paid per carat.
But it is best to be well-informed about colored diamonds if a purchase is planned. There are many agencies selling diamonds colored by exposure to radioactivity, meaning that they are not naturally occurring stones, and of significantly lesser value and durability. It is best to ask many questions about the origins of a colored diamond before making a purchase. The popularity of the stones is making it more difficult to find genuine diamonds. The beauty of a natural colored diamond comes from its unique qualities and its rare colorations, but setting and style of cut should also be taken into consideration when acquiring these wonders of nature.
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