102.39-carat diamond Hammered!

 

Sold for US$15,694,870 at Sotheby’s! 

D Colour Flawless Oval Diamond named, Maiko Star! 

Moments ago at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, one of the earth’s rarest and most coveted wonders – a highly important 102.39-carat D Colour Flawless Oval Diamond - sold for HK$121,562,000 / US$15,694,870 in an unprecedented single-lot live auction. Offered without reserve-a first at auction for a lot of this importance and inherent value, the diamond attracted enormous interest and a flurry of bids, taking it quickly from HK$1 to well over HK$100m. 

Some of those bids were also placed online, the highest of which was HK$85m / US$10.97m - the highest value bid ever placed on a jewel online. 

The winning bid, though, came over the phone from a private collector in Japan, who, shortly after the sale, renamed the diamond the ‘Maiko Star’, after his second daughter.   

This now establishes a family tradition: last year, the same collector purchased another important diamond from Sotheby’s, naming it the ‘Manami Star’, after his eldest daughter. 

This extraordinary gem needed no help from a pre-sale estimate or reserve to reach its rightful price – just the instinctive desire of collectors to own one of the earth’s greatest treasures. We are grateful to Diacore for their trust and confidence in allowing us to offer this diamond without reserve, the result for which testifies not just to the importance of this diamond, but to the market for diamonds more broadly. 

Patti Wong, Chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, “It has been fascinating to embark on this project. We are of course delighted with the results and the positive message the sale sends out to the market. The result is also testament to the maestria of our diamond cutters: Only eight D colour Internally Flawless or Flawless white diamonds over 100 carats ever sold at auction, six of them by Diacore.” 

The 102.39 diamond was cut from a 271-carat rough discovered in the Victor Mine, Ontario, Canada in 2018. Following its discovery, the rough was cut and polished over a year by Diacore, world-leading specialists in sourcing, cutting and polishing extraordinary diamonds, to bring out its best brilliance, fire and scintillation.