The Spirit of the Rose is the Largest Vivid Purple-Pink Diamond Ever Sold at Auction
Cut from the biggest pink crystal ever found in Siberia and named for a legendary ballet, the Spirit of the Rose, a 14.83-carat marvel, sold for $26.6 million. Here’s the story behind its impossibly rare color.
A 14.83-carat oval Fancy Vivid Purple-Pink of internally flawless clarity, it holds the distinction of being the largest purple-pink diamond ever to appear at auction. When the Spirit of the Rose diamond crossed the block at Sotheby’s Geneva in November 2020, it set a world record. A diamond combining this color, this size, and this clarity is certainly a miracle of nature.
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.
The Spirit of the Rose Diamond Was Born From a Record-Breaking Rough
The story begins deep in Siberia, at what is one of the world’s most important diamond sources. In 2017, miners unearthed an extraordinary 27.85-carat clear pink rough diamond, the largest pink crystal ever discovered in the region. A stone like that is a once-in-a-generation discovery, and it deserved a name worthy of its significance. They called it the Nijinsky, after the legendary ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
Transforming that rough into a finished gem was no small task. It took cutting masters a full year to study, plan, and polish the stone into its final form. They chose an oval shape for a specific reason: it allowed them to retain the maximum possible size from the rough while using dozens of carefully placed facets to emphasize the diamond’s gentle, rose-petal color. This is not an ordinary oval cut. It carries many extra facets beyond a standard oval, a unique faceting pattern designed specifically to accentuate the pink and give the stone a brilliance most ovals do not possess.
Why Pink Diamonds Are So Extraordinarily Rare
Here is where the science gets fascinating, because pink diamonds break all the usual rules. Most fancy color diamonds owe their color to trace elements. Boron creates blue. Nitrogen produces yellow. Pink diamonds contain no such impurity. In fact, the Spirit of the Rose is a Type IIa diamond, the purest category that exists, containing little to no impurities at all.
So where does the color come from? Scientists believe pink diamonds get their color from a structural rather than a chemical cause. As the diamond formed deep in the Earth and endured immense heat and pressure, its crystal structure underwent a distortion, a subtle rearrangement of the carbon atoms themselves. That distortion changes the way the diamond absorbs and reflects light, producing the pink hue we see.
In the case of the Spirit of the Rose, that distortion also produced a secondary purple modifier, giving the stone its rare and coveted purple-pink character. Because this color comes from the diamond’s actual structure rather than an added element, it is extraordinarily difficult for nature to produce, which is precisely why pink diamonds are among the rarest gems on the planet.
The Ballet That Inspired the Spirit of the Rose Diamond
The diamond takes its name from Le Spectre de la Rose, or The Spirit of the Rose, the most famous ballet ever performed by the Ballets Russes and the role for which Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky remains universally celebrated. Written by Jean-Louis Vaudoyer and based on a verse by the 19th-century French poet Théophile Gautier, the ballet premiered in Monte Carlo on April 19, 1911. It told the story of a young girl, danced by prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who returns from her first ball, falls asleep, and dreams she is dancing with a rose personified by Nijinsky.
The performance became legendary, especially Nijinsky’s spectacular leap through a window at the finale. His costume, designed by Leon Bakst, was an elastic silk bodysuit covered in silk rose petals that the wardrobe mistress had to touch up with her curling iron before every show. There is a charming legend that Nijinsky’s servant, Vasili, collected the petals that fell to the stage and sold them as souvenirs, earning enough to build himself a house. Naming this diamond after that ballet is a fitting tribute. Like Nijinsky’s rose, the stone seems almost to glow from within.
The Spirit of the Rose Diamond’s $26.6 Million Sale Made Auction History
When the Spirit of the Rose diamond reached Sotheby’s Geneva in November 2020, an anonymous telephone bidder secured it for $26.6 million, roughly $1.8 million per carat. That result set a record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a fancy vivid purple-pink diamond. The GIA had graded it internally flawless with excellent polish and very good symmetry, confirming its status as the largest vivid purple-pink diamond the laboratory had ever evaluated.
The timing made it even more significant. With the closure of the Argyle mine in Australia, the source of roughly 90 percent of the world’s pink diamonds, the global supply of these stones is shrinking rapidly. Large, vivid pink diamonds were already almost impossibly rare. Now they are becoming the stuff of legend. For collectors and dealers of fancy color diamonds, an opportunity like the Spirit of the Rose diamond is nearly impossible to resist, because stones of this caliber may simply never come again.
