Fancy Buying a 51 Carat Diamond Online?

Russia is selling this beauty via an online auction….

In case you didn’t know, Russia is one of the biggest players in the diamond industry. The vast country has huge supplies of top quality diamond under all that snow and ice. It’s the largest diamond producing country in the world and the second most productive diamond mining country on the planet too. In other words, they have one of the largest diamond supplies and they’re one of the best and fastest and mining the little gems, too.

Diamond mining in Russia is dominated by Alrosa, and they’ve been coming up with some outstanding results recently. In 2015 the company unearthed a 179 carat Romanovs rough diamond from the Yakutia region in the far east of the country. For the past 18 months, expert cutters and polishers have painstakingly worked on the rough gem to create five polished diamonds for a collection that is unprecedented in Russian jewellery’s history.

Dedicated to the Tsar Peter the Great (the guy who is responsible for St. Petersburg and the Romanov dynasty), the collection is the most expensive to ever come from Russia. The pinnacle of the five gems is a 51.38 carat diamond, which is pretty much as perfect a specimen as you can get. It’s a traditional 57 facet round brilliant, triple excellent cut, with a D colour (i.e. colourless) and VVS1 clarity (i.e pretty much flawless).

The other diamonds in the collection include a 16.67 carat round diamond, a 5.05 carat oval diamond, a 1.73 carat pear cut diamond, and another 1.39 carat diamond.

Alrosa plans to sell the gem with its four brothers and sisters as a single set in November, through an online auction. It’s part of an overall strategy to find new ways to sell diamonds to new markets, as well as to add value to from Alrosa’s perspective. The starting price is said to be a minimum of $10 million, so start saving!

If you can’t afford to part with that much cash, you may also be able to catch this incredible gem when the collection goes on tour this autumn; it’ll be heading to Israel, Hong Kong and the United States.