The Pink Star Diamond

On April 4, 2017, Sotheby’s Hong Kong offered a diamond that had no real precedent in auction history. The Pink Star — a 59.60-carat oval mixed-cut stone, graded by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) as Fancy Vivid Pink, Internally Flawless, Type IIa — sold for HKD 553,000,000, equivalent to $71.2 million. The result set the world record for any diamond and any gemstone ever sold at auction, a record that remains unbroken to this day.

The buyer was Chow Tai Fook, the Hong Kong-based jewelry group, which subsequently renamed the stone the “CTF Pink Star” in honor of its founder Cheng Yu-Tung.

From Rough to Record: The Stone's History

The Pink Star was mined by De Beers in South Africa in 1999 as a rough stone weighing approximately 132.5 carats — an extraordinary size for a gem-quality pink diamond. It was acquired by Steinmetz Diamonds, which spent over twenty months cutting and polishing the rough into its current 59.60-carat form. The process required exceptional care: a single error in orientation could have compromised the intensity of the pink color, which derives from structural deformations in the crystal lattice — a phenomenon unique to Type IIa diamonds and not yet fully understood at the molecular level.

The stone was publicly unveiled in 2003 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., receiving the GIA’s highest pink color designation: Fancy Vivid.

Its first auction appearance came in November 2013 at Sotheby’s Geneva, where it sold for $83.18 million — a world record at the time. However, the buyer, diamond dealer Isaac Wolf, defaulted on payment, and the stone reverted to Sotheby’s ownership. It was renamed “Pink Star, Property of Sotheby’s” and eventually consigned again for the 2017 Hong Kong sale.

Why Pink Diamonds Command Extraordinary Premiums

Pink diamonds are among the rarest materials on Earth. The overwhelming majority of all gem-quality fancy vivid pink diamonds have historically come from a single source: the Argyle mine in Western Australia, operated by Rio Tinto. Argyle produced only a small annual parcel of truly exceptional pinks — typically fewer than fifty carats of polished Fancy Vivid and Fancy Intense stones per year from an operation processing hundreds of millions of tonnes of ore.

The mine closed permanently in November 2020, fundamentally altering the supply structure for pink diamonds. With no comparable source identified, the existing inventory of certified Fancy Vivid Pink diamonds — particularly larger stones — is effectively finite and non-replenishable.

The GIA Type IIa designation adds another layer of rarity. Type IIa diamonds contain no detectable nitrogen, making them chemically purer than the vast majority of diamonds. Combined with a Fancy Vivid color and Internally Flawless clarity, the Pink Star represented the convergence of every possible quality criterion at maximum intensity.

The $71.2 Million Result in Context

At $71.2 million, the Pink Star achieved a price per carat of approximately $1.19 million — comparable to the Sunrise Ruby’s record in the colored stone world, but at more than twice the carat weight. The result demonstrated that the very top of the diamond market does not simply reflect incremental premiums for quality; it operates in a different pricing space entirely, where scarcity, provenance, and institutional quality certification interact to produce outcomes that no price model can fully predict.

For auction professionals, the Hong Kong venue was equally significant. The decision to present this stone in Asia reflected a deliberate strategic alignment with the primary collector base for top-tier fancy colored diamonds — a demographic shift that had been visible in Sotheby’s and Christie’s Hong Kong results for at least a decade prior.

The GemmoPrice Perspective

The CTF Pink Star is not a data point. It is a category definition. Its result reshaped how buyers, dealers, and institutions approach the valuation of exceptional fancy vivid pink diamonds, and it underscored a principle that applies across all rare gemstone categories: at sufficient levels of quality and rarity, the concept of a “fair market value” becomes increasingly theoretical.

GemmoPrice tracks auction results for fancy colored diamonds alongside colored stones, enabling direct comparative analysis across categories and across time. The Pink Star’s record — in both its 2013 and 2017 iterations — remains one of the most-referenced benchmarks in the platform’s dataset.