The Pink Star: The Most Expensive Diamond Ever Sold

In April 2017, an auctioneer in Hong Kong opened bidding on a single pink diamond. Roughly five minutes later it sold for about $71.2 million — the highest price ever paid for any diamond or gemstone at auction. The Pink Star isn’t the biggest famous diamond, nor the oldest. What makes it extraordinary is a combination so rare that gemologists call it almost a miracle: enormous size, flawless purity, and the deepest grade of pink color there is.

From rough to record

The diamond was mined by De Beers in Africa in 1999 as a rough stone of about 132.5 carats. Cutting a pink diamond of that scale is agonizingly slow work — the goal is to preserve both weight and the precious color. The firm Steinmetz spent roughly two years studying and shaping it before revealing a 59.60-carat oval mixed-cut gem, first shown to the public in 2003 as the "Steinmetz Pink."

Why pink diamonds are so rare

Most colored diamonds owe their hue to chemical impurities — nitrogen for yellow, boron for blue. Pink is different and stranger. Scientists believe it comes from distortions in the diamond’s atomic lattice, created by immense heat and pressure deep in the earth, which change how the crystal absorbs light. There is no added element to explain it, which is part of why natural vivid pinks are among the scarcest gems on the planet.

A graded "fancy vivid pink" with internally flawless clarity at nearly 60 carats had simply never come to market before. Rarity, not size alone, set the record.

The minute that made history

At a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong in April 2017, the diamond — by then renamed the Pink Star — sold in about five minutes of bidding for roughly $71.2 million. The buyer, the Hong Kong jeweler Chow Tai Fook, renamed it the "CTF Pink Star." The price set a world auction record for any gemstone that stood for years.

The vanishing source

Pink diamonds became even more coveted after 2020, when Australia’s Argyle mine — the source of the vast majority of the world’s pink diamonds — closed for good. With its main supply gone, the value of fine natural pinks has only climbed, making stones like the Pink Star feel less like jewelry and more like irreplaceable natural treasures.

Weight

59.60 carats

Color & clarity

Fancy vivid pink, internally flawless

Cut from

~132.5-carat rough (mined 1999)

Sold

2017, Hong Kong — ~$71.2 million

Now called

The CTF Pink Star

The takeaway

The Pink Star is the modern proof that color is king. A flawless, vivid pink of nearly 60 carats — born from a freak distortion in its atoms and now from a source that no longer exists — commanded the highest price any gem has ever fetched. In the world of diamonds, the rarest color beats the biggest stone.