Exceptional Pink to Red Diamonds: A Celebration of the 30th Argyle Diamond Tender

Abstract

Over the past three decades, more than one thousand pink diamonds from Rio Tinto's Argyle mine in Western Australia have been offered for sale at annual invitation-only events known as tenders. These diamonds, selected from the mine's large annual production of rough, are cut and polished at the company's factory in Perth for the tenders. These diamonds have all been graded by GIA, as their color grade is a crucial value consideration. This article summarizes each year's collection and presents some pertinent statistical information on color grade and description for this important group of rare colored diamonds.

Natural-Color Pink, Purple, Red, and Brown Diamonds: Band of Many Colors

“…Previously, several aspects of gem-quality "pink" diamonds have been addressed, such as their gemological characteristics (e.g., King et al, 2002); their defects and associated spectroscopic features (e.g., Titkov et al, 2008;Deljanin et al, 2008;Fisher et al, 2009;Gaillou et al, 2010;Stepanov et al, 2011;Byrne et al, 2012a,b;Titkov et al, 2012;Gaillou et al, 2012;Howell et al, 2015); and reports on notable "pink" diamonds (Smith and Bosshart, 2002;King et al, 2014). Here we review the published literature and supplement it by compiling results obtained from 90,000+ natural diamonds recorded in the GIA internal database.…”