Pink diamond sells for record-breaking £21.8m

The seller of the most expensive polished diamond ever sold at auction has broke another record with the sale of the largest fancy vivid pear-shaped pink diamond.

The 15.38-carat diamond – named ‘Unique Pink’ – sold for $31.56m (£21.8m) at Sotheby’s Geneva on Tuesday 17 March and became the most expensive diamond of its type to go under the hammer.

The diamond, which was unveiled in London on 7 April, received the highest colour grading for a pink diamond from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) and was found to be type IIa, displaying “exceedingly pure structure”.

Cora International, whose chairman is Ehud Laniado, sold The Blue Moon, which was renamed The Blue Moon of Josephine by its new buyer, for a world record 48.6m Swiss francs (£31.8m) in November last year.

It beat the previous auction record for any diamond held by The Graff Pink (24.78-carats), which sold for $46.2m (£30.4m) at Sotheby’s Geneva in 2010.

Laniado said: “In the last 11 years, pink diamonds have risen in value by more than 350%. By comparison, gold has risen by just over 160%, according to the Fancy Color Research Foundation.

“Pink diamonds are among the rarest in the world and they are increasingly being viewed as an investment, something I believe is the way of the future. Diamonds are beautiful and a treasure of nature, but more than this, they offer an economy of rarity that is making them increasingly attractive to savvy investors.”