The De Beers Cullinan Blue

“This diamond ranks as one of the best De Beers has ever seen. It is extremely rare and unique, and as the Home of Diamonds, De Beers is pleased to join together with Sotheby’s to bring this diamond to the world.”

                      – BRUCE CLEAVER, CEO OF DE BEERS GROUP

Among the rarest of all coloured diamonds, blue diamonds are a fabulous fluke of nature, their blue usually caused by the presence of trace amounts of the rare element boron within the diamond crystal lattice. Quite aside from their rarity, the very fact of their colour makes blue diamonds ultimately covetable. Voted as the favourite colour of both men and women worldwide, the unequalled popularity – and mystery – of blue has endured for millennia. From Tutankhamun’s lapis lazuli-encrusted funeral mask, to the unmistakable works of Yves Klein. The poet Goethe felt that blue had “a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye,” and the expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky – one of the founding members of the group of artists known as the Blue Rider – wrote: “The deeper the blue the more it beckons man into the infinite, arousing a longing for purity and the supersensuous.” In nature too, blue is inextricably associated with the rare, the exotic and the magnificent: birds of paradise, tropical butterflies, peacocks. And, rarest of all, blue diamonds.

The natural exclusivity of these precious gemstones has ignited the imagination of connoisseurs over centuries. Early records can be traced back to the 17th century when Jean Baptiste Tavernier sold a dark blue diamond to King Louis XIV of France, which was originally called the Tavernier Blue, and then the French Blue as a part of the French Crown Jewels.