Blue Moon Diamond: $26 Million for Uncut Stone

the color is the most special internally flawless and then the size of 12 carats but I would say to me the most rare part of the stone is the fact that it's such an exquisite perfectly so yes or how rare is it to find something that has a sort of deep ocean blue color that stone is historical it's absolutely beautiful you do get different you know colors of blue but that's a special special blue and so that how you got the name blue moon diamond yeah woman yeah once in a blue moon because really that's how rate is I mean I've never seen a stone in this color in my life in diamonds Wow so I feel yeah I feel privileged this is the highlight of my career and talk us through that process a little bit you start off with with the raw diamonds and it how does it get to be this perfect shape so when the rough arrives what we do is our cutter studies that our gemologist studies it he makes models out of plastic and he then marks it because on a rough stone you mark where you're going to cut and put it on the wheel so he's cutting the model and the reason for this is if we make a mistake it's not costing us millions of dollars and so he'll make like 20 to 30 models and he'll keep cutting them and you want the stone to be internally flawless so you've got to get rid of all the impurities in stone and that's why the models are so important and because you need that 12 carat and you need the color to be great and you want you to be flawless we then take the real stone market and put it on the wheel how long does it take well it took months I mean we've only just finished it and we're in August and we got the stone in February and you didn't wind up paying about 26 million for the uncut diamond how does that compare to other big purchases that you've made that's huge is it your I think that's our biggest so far in terms of value you know we've cut bigger stones but but we've never cut a stone at that value what do you hope to sell it for we haven't gotten to that yet you know it's historic it's rare so you know the next step for us is to have it at the Smithsonian to do the scientific testing and then for it to go to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and we'll see from there but we haven't actually sat down and done the valuation yet but I mean it's tens of millions of dollars as you can imagine and we take a look at the broad supply you know DeBeers saying that hey this year we can produce as much as 32 million carats of diamonds is there enough demand for that kind of supply yes where is it mostly come from you know America's takes 40% of the market it's worth billions of dollars you're talking about you know the bridal industry you're talking about retailers you know the top houses in the world there's always a demand for diamond jewelry synthetic diamonds are you scared of them no and I'll tell you why no because we don't call them synthetic the people that have synthetic diamonds we call it lab-grown so they're growing it it's like a cultured pearl but it's not actually the same and we're not scared of it natural diamonds like this diamonds the natural color diamond is going to be more in demand for person that wants something natural even though that diamonds been lab-grown from from a diamond it's not the same thing as mother nature you have to inform people that it's lab-grown there's a legislation for that and it's going to be enforced what's the growth rate that you're expecting it seems like global diamond jewelry sales have increased threefold in the past 25 years what's the growth rate you can predict over the next looking at the market because it can be volatile but I think in diamonds and in jewelry you're looking at a 10% increase that's what I'm thinking on your terms of yeah because you're looking at new people coming into the market the Chinese market is going to take a lot of the product you know they're starting to get into engagement rings that they want to wear jewelry they want to wear you know they want to be part of the whole process so I think that's going to raise the demand so it's I'm going to make this into a ring it could be a ring it could be a ring my husband was named painted what we can call in what's his knowledge

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 191,708

Rating: 4.8343949 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, Diamond (Material), Blue, luxury, diamond, Luxury Goods (Literature Subject)

Id: erkf7VNabrk

Length: 4min 3sec (243 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 11 2014