The Aurora Green Diamond: The Most Expensive Green Diamond Ever Sold at Auction
The Aurora Green Diamond. (Courtesy of Christie’s)
Natural green diamonds are in a category of rarity so extreme that many gemologists spend entire careers without ever handling a truly fine one. Pure natural green color in a diamond is not the product of trace elements like boron or nitrogen. It comes from something far stranger — radioactive exposure deep in the earth over millions of years — and the result is a color so uncommon that fewer than ten natural green diamonds exist for every 10,000 fancy color diamonds the GIA grades.
Of those, Fancy Vivid Green diamonds represent the rarest tier of all. The Aurora Green Diamond sits at the very top of that already impossibly small group.
Meet the Expert
- Grant Mobley is the Jewelry & Watch Editor of Only Natural Diamonds.
- He is a GIA Diamonds Graduate.
- He has over 17 years of jewelry industry experience, starting with growing up in his family’s retail jewelry stores.
What Is the Aurora Green Diamond?
The Aurora Green is a 5.03-carat radiant-cut natural diamond graded by the GIA as Fancy Vivid Green with VS2 clarity and no fluorescence. That last detail matters more than it might seem. A stone of this color and size showing no fluorescence is extraordinarily unusual, adding another layer of rarity to a diamond that already had more than enough.
The Aurora Green originated in Brazil, a country that produces relatively small volumes of diamonds but has a track record of yielding exceptional natural-color stones. The Moussaieff Red, the largest known natural red diamond in the world, also came from Brazilian soil.
Inside the Aurora Green Diamond’s Historic Sale
On May 31, 2016, Christie’s sold the Aurora Green for $16.8 million, achieving $3.3 million per carat. The buyer was Chow Tai Fook, the prominent Chinese jewelry retailer. The sale made the Aurora Green the most expensive green diamond ever sold at auction and set a new record for price per carat in its color category. The previous record was held by a 2.54-carat Fancy Vivid Green VS1 diamond that sold at Sotheby’s in November 2009 for $1.22 million per carat. The Aurora Green more than tripled that figure.
The diamond came to market through Scarselli Diamonds and arrived in a setting that beautifully complements its extraordinary color. A pink diamond halo ring with natural pink diamonds continuing all the way down the band, a pairing that makes the vivid green center stone appear even more striking against its rosy surround.
How Green Diamonds Get Their Extraordinary Color
The color story behind green diamonds is unlike any other in the diamond world, and it starts with a simple fact: most natural diamond colors come from what is inside the crystal. Boron gets into the structure and produces blue. Nitrogen drives yellow. Green takes a completely different path.
When diamonds make their way from deep in the mantle toward the surface through volcanic activity, some of them end up sitting in alluvial deposits near the Earth’s surface for millions of years. If those deposits happen to contain minerals with radioactive isotopes of uranium or thorium, the diamond slowly absorbs radiation over thousands or even millions of years. That radiation knocks carbon atoms out of position within the crystal, creating vacant sites that scientists call GR1 centers. Those vacancies alter how the stone handles light, and the result is green.
Why Green Diamond Color Is Difficult to Preserve
Here is where it gets complicated. That radioactive exposure generally only reaches a few micrometers beneath the surface, which means the green color lives in a thin skin on the outside of the rough stone. Start cutting and polishing, and that skin can disappear before the diamond is finished, leaving no green color. Experienced cutters spend serious time planning how to work around this, mapping out facet placement to preserve as much color as possible while still producing a beautiful finished stone. Heat is another enemy. Diamond polishing generates friction, and if the stone gets too hot during the process, the color itself can fade.
Then there is the issue of origin, which carries real financial weight. Machines can reproduce the process artificially, bombarding diamonds with electrons, neutrons, or gamma rays to create the same GR1 vacancies and produce green color that looks almost identical to the natural version. Telling the two apart requires sophisticated gemological testing, and the price difference between a naturally colored green diamond and a treated one is extreme. That is why GIA confirmation of natural color origin is the foundation of its entire value.
Where the Aurora Green Diamond Ranks Among the Most Famous Green Diamonds
Green diamonds have a history as remarkable as their color. The Dresden Green Diamond, a 40.70-carat natural Fancy Green stone from India’s Golconda region, is the most famous green diamond in existence and one of the great historical gems of any color. Its even, apple-green color and extraordinary size make it irreplaceable, and it lives today in the New Green Vault at Dresden Castle in Germany.
More recently, green diamonds entered mainstream consciousness through one of the decade’s most talked-about engagements. Ben Affleck proposed to Jennifer Lopez with an 8.5-carat radiant-cut natural green diamond ring, flanked by two half-moon accent diamonds, set on a platinum band. Lopez shared at the time that the green color held special meaning for her, writing that green had always been her lucky color. The couple married in Las Vegas in July 2022. They finalized their divorce in January 2025, and Lopez retained the ring, which is estimated to be worth over $5 million.
The Value of the Aurora Green Diamond and the Green Diamond Market
Green diamonds make up less than 0.1 percent of all fancy color diamonds that the GIA grades. That figure alone explains the price trajectory. The previous auction record before the Aurora Green belonged to the Ocean Dream, a 5.50-carat fancy vivid blue-green diamond that sold at Christie’s Geneva in May 2014 for $8.6 million. That stone is heading back to auction this year, giving the market a rare opportunity to measure exactly how much a decade of appreciation looks like for an exceptional natural color diamond in the green family.
