Rare 15.1-carat blue diamond fetches nearly $57.5M at auction

HONG KONG — Talk about some serious bling.

An unnamed bidder paid $HK450.9 million, or $57.47 million, on Wednesday to win a 15.1-carat blue diamond at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong, the company said.

The winner of the massive stone, dubbed the De Beers Cullinan Blue, comes away with the “largest vivid blue diamond ever to appear at auction,” Sotheby’s said in a news release. The diamond, which was “cut from an exceptional rough stone” discovered last year in South Africa’s Cullinan Mine, also is “the largest internally flawless step-cut vivid blue diamond” graded by the Gemological Institute of America, the release said.

“Blue diamonds of any kind are rare on the market, but this is the rarest of the rare; nothing of remotely similar caliber has appeared at auction in recent years,” Sotheby’s Asia Chairman Patti Wong said in a statement earlier this year. “Hundreds of millions of years in the making, this extraordinary blue diamond is surely one of nature’s finest creations.”

Although the diamond ended up fetching $9.47 million more than experts had anticipated, its final price failed to surpass the world record-setting $57.54 million paid for the 14.62-carat Oppenheimer Blue in 2016, according to CNN.

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