Russian pink diamond "The Spirit of the Rose" was sold at Sotheby's for a record $ 27 million

Irina Ziganshina

The Spirit of the Rose, a rare 14.83-carat purplish pink diamond, was sold at Sotheby's in Geneva on Wednesday for $ 26.6 million. In just a few minutes after the stone was listed in an online auction, bids reached 21 million Swiss francs. The buyer wished to remain anonymous, AFP reports.

The Spirit of the Rose was cut from a 27.85-carat stone found in 2017 by the Alrosa diamond mining company in the Sakha Republic. It took about a year of painstaking work to cut the diamond to the desired shape while retaining its pink color.

Sotheby's auctioneer Benoit Repellen called the diamond a "miracle of nature" and noticed that the prices of pink gemstones are constantly rising as they appear less and less. These are the rarest of the precious stones, and therefore they are always in demand on the world market.

The most expensive pink diamond in the world is CTF Star Pink, which departed in 2017 in Hong Kong for $ 71.2 million. Five of the ten most expensive diamonds ever sold were pink and have all been sold in the past 10 years.

Curiously, this month the world's largest pink diamond mine, the Australian Argyle mine, which accounted for more than 90% of all world production, stopped mining this month. This happened because the stone reserves were depleted.