The Most Expensive Diamonds Ever Sold

On This Page

• The four records
• The results
• The record that went backwards
• The stone that lost seven million dollars
• The cliff between two grades
• Two diamonds that have never been sold
• What I make of it
• Top Takeaways to Success
• Frequently Asked Questions

Two blue diamonds sit next to each other on every list of the most expensive stones ever sold, both marked $57.5 million, usually described as tied.

They are not tied, and the auction house that sold one of them said so at the time.

Sotheby’s own press release gives the De Beers Blue at $57,471,960 and the Oppenheimer Blue at $57,541,779. The gap is $69,819. Sotheby’s called its result a near tie that falls just short of the record, which is a careful sentence that almost nobody reproduced.

Per carat they are not close at all. The Oppenheimer Blue, 14.62 carats, made about $3.936 million per carat. The De Beers Blue, 15.10 carats, made about $3.806 million. A wider margin than the totals suggest, in the opposite direction to what the rounding implies.

The four records

Highest total for a single stone: $71.2 million. The CTF Pink Star, 59.60 carats, fancy vivid pink, internally flawless, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 4 April 2017. Paid as HK$553,000,000.

Highest price per carat: about $5.18 million. The Williamson Pink Star, 11.15 carats, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, October 2022. Roughly four times the Pink Star’s per-carat rate on a stone a fifth of the size.

Highest for a collection: $202.1 million. The Heidi Horten sale, Christie’s Geneva, May 2023, across some 700 lots. The Elizabeth Taylor collection is second at $137.2 million.

Highest verified private sale: $53 million. The Lesedi La Rona, a 1,109 carat rough stone, bought directly by Graff in 2017.

The results

Prices realised, in the currency of sale. Dollar figures are conversions.

#	Stone	Carats	Grade	Price	Sale
1	Heidi Horten collection	n/a	n/a	$202,100,000	Christie’s Geneva, May 2023
2	Elizabeth Taylor collection	n/a	n/a	$137,200,000	Christie’s New York, Dec 2011
3	CTF Pink Star	59.60	FV Pink IF	HK$553,000,000	Sotheby’s HK, 4 Apr 2017
4	Pink Star, 2013 sale, buyer defaulted	59.60	FV Pink IF	CHF 76,300,000	Sotheby’s Geneva, 13 Nov 2013
5	Williamson Pink Star	11.15	FV Pink IF	HK$453,223,000	Sotheby’s HK, 5 Oct 2022
6	Oppenheimer Blue	14.62	FV Blue	CHF 56,837,000	Christie’s Geneva, 18 May 2016
7	De Beers Blue	15.10	FV Blue	HK$450,925,000	Sotheby’s HK, 27 Apr 2022
8	Apollo Blue and Artemis Pink earrings	14.54 + 16.00	FV Blue / FI Pink	$57,400,000 across two lots	Sotheby’s Geneva, 16 May 2017
9	Lesedi La Rona, rough	1,109	Type IIa rough	$53,000,000	Private, Graff, Sep 2017
10	Winston Pink Legacy	18.96	FV Pink	about $50,400,000	Christie’s Geneva, 13 Nov 2018
11	Blue Moon of Josephine	12.03	FV Blue IF	CHF 48,600,000	Sotheby’s Geneva, 11 Nov 2015
12	Graff Pink	24.78	Fancy Intense Pink	about $46,200,000	Sotheby’s Geneva, 16 Nov 2010
13	Bleu Royal	17.61	FV Blue	about $44,000,000	Christie’s Geneva, Nov 2023
14	Princie Diamond	34.65	FI Pink	$39,300,000	Christie’s New York, Apr 2013
15	Marie Antoinette pearl pendant	natural pearl	n/a	CHF 36,427,000	Sotheby’s Geneva, 14 Nov 2018
16	Eternal Pink	10.57	FV Purplish Pink	$34,800,000	Sotheby’s New York, Jun 2023
17	Zoe Diamond	9.75	FV Blue VVS1	$32,600,000	Sotheby’s New York, Nov 2014
18	Fortune Pink	18.18	FV Pink	about $28,500,000	Christie’s Geneva, 8 Nov 2022
19	Mellon Blue, the recut Zoe	9.51	FV Blue IF	CHF 20,525,000	Christie’s Geneva, 11 Nov 2025
20	Wittelsbach	35.56	Fancy Deep Greyish Blue	£16,400,000	Christie’s London, 10 Dec 2008
21	Winston Blue	13.22	FV Blue	$23,800,000	Christie’s Geneva, 15 May 2014
22	Archduke Joseph	76.02	D IF	about $21,500,000	Christie’s Geneva, Nov 2012
23	Mediterranean Blue	10.03	FV Blue	CHF 17,900,000	Sotheby’s Geneva, 13 May 2025
24	Ocean Dream	5.51	FV Blue-Green	CHF 13,567,500	Christie’s Geneva, 13 May 2026

Row four is in the table because it is quoted as a record and should be. It is not a completed sale.

Row eight is two separate lots that get added together into a single figure. The earrings were sold individually at $42.1 million and $15.3 million.

The record that went backwards

The Pink Star has sold twice, and the second sale was smaller.

In November 2013 at Sotheby’s Geneva it hammered at CHF 68 million and realised CHF 76.3 million, about $83 million, then a world record for any gemstone. The buyer, a New York diamond cutter bidding for a group of investors, said he would rename it the Pink Dream.

He defaulted.

Sotheby’s had guaranteed the consignor $60 million, so with two partner firms it bought the stone itself at that price and carried it in inventory at roughly $72 million. It found investors, and re-offered the diamond as a single-lot sale in Hong Kong in April 2017, where the Chow Tai Fook chairman bought it by telephone for $71.2 million and renamed it the CTF Pink Star.

So the current world record for a diamond, set in 2017, is lower than the bid it replaced from four years earlier. The 2013 figure still appears on lists as a completed sale.

The stone that lost seven million dollars

Rows seventeen and nineteen are the same diamond.

In November 2014 a 9.75 carat fancy vivid blue sold at Sotheby’s New York for $32.6 million, then the price-per-carat record, and was named the Zoe Diamond.

Its owner had it recut, from 9.75 to 9.51 carats, lifting the clarity from VVS1 to internally flawless.

In November 2025 it sold at Christie’s Geneva as the Mellon Blue for CHF 20,525,000, about $25.6 million.

That is a nominal loss of roughly $7 million over eleven years, before fees on both transactions and before inflation. On a stone that had been improved, in a category whose entire marketing rests on the idea that these things only go up.

It is the single most under-reported figure I found researching this page, and it sits alongside similar findings elsewhere in this section: a Babe Ruth card that lost $3.18 million on resale, a pair of Michael Jordan’s shoes that lost 57 percent.

The cliff between two grades

Colourless diamonds run on the familiar D to Z scale, where more colour is worse. Fancy colour diamonds fall off the end of that scale entirely and are graded on hue, tone and saturation, rising through Fancy Light, Fancy, Fancy Intense, to Fancy Vivid. Here more colour is better.

The grades are not a smooth curve. Fancy Vivid is a cliff edge.

Comparable retail stock makes it concrete: a 0.59 carat Fancy Intense purplish pink at $59,100 against a 0.58 carat Fancy Vivid purplish pink at $174,100. Nearly the same stone, one grade apart, roughly three times the price, on a stone that is fractionally smaller.

The same effect runs through the table above. The Graff Pink is 24.78 carats and Fancy Intense, at about $1.86 million per carat. The Pink Legacy is 18.96 carats and Fancy Vivid, at about $2.66 million per carat. The smaller stone is worth substantially more per carat because of one word on a certificate.

Two diamonds that have never been sold

The Hope Diamond is routinely valued at $200 to $350 million. It has never been auctioned. It was given to the Smithsonian in 1958 and the figure is speculation.

The Koh-i-Noor has never been bought or sold. It has been part of the British Crown Jewels since 1849.

Both appear on lists of the most expensive diamonds in the world, where they do not belong. A valuation is not a price.

What I make of it

The reporting problem in this category is smaller and more precise than in most: the underlying sales are real, the auction houses are competent, and the numbers exist.

What goes wrong is arithmetic. Two blue diamonds get rounded to the same figure and called a tie when their own auction house published a $69,819 gap. A defaulted bid stays on lists as a sale. Hong Kong dollars and Swiss francs get quoted as dollars nobody paid. Two earring lots are added together into a record that was never a single transaction.

My read is that the Mellon Blue matters more than anything else here, and you will find it nowhere else. A world-record blue diamond, recut to improve it, sold eleven years later for seven million dollars less. That is not a market crashing. It is a reminder that a record price is a description of one afternoon, and the next afternoon can disagree.

For more record prices, see the most expensive things ever sold.