In the end, the prices did not fly as expected. Fifty-five facets, weighing 555.55 carats (111.11 g): the Enigma, the largest natural black diamond in the world, was auctioned on Wednesday for 3.16 million pounds sterling (3.75 million euros) in London, the auction house Sotheby’s announced. Experts had estimated its sale at more than five million euros.
The diamond, auctioned following an online auction that ended on Wednesday, was registered in 2004 as the world’s largest natural black diamond by specialists GIA and Gübelin and in 2006 as the world’s largest cut diamond by the Guinness Book of Records.
Unlike classic diamonds that are extracted from the bowels of the earth, black diamonds are found more on the surface evoking “possible extraterrestrial origins,” Sotheby’s points out.
A 2.6 billion-year-old ancient stone
“It is believed that this type of black diamonds comes either from meteorite impacts producing a deposit of chemical vapors or from an extraterrestrial origin, from supernova explosions forming diamond-bearing asteroids that ultimately collide with the earth,” the auction house says.
They are found today exclusively in Brazil and the Central African Republic. Their structure makes these diamonds among the hardest, so that they are almost impossible to carve and polish. This one would have been created when a meteorite or an asteroid hit the Earth, more than 2.6 billion years ago, according to Sophie Stevens, jewelry specialist for the auction house Sotheby’s.
The Enigma was bought in the late 1990s and weighed more than 800 carats in the rough and it took more than three years to carve it into its current 55-faceted form. Its shape is inspired by the Hamsa, an amulet in the shape of a hand as a sign of protection once morest the evil eye in the Middle East.
The price record for a diamond sold at auction is held by the pink diamond “Pink Star”, which was sold for $71.2 million at Sotheby’s auctions in Hong Kong in 2017.
