The Pink Promise

A bet against its own weight

Most famous diamonds are known for how big they are. The Pink Promise is known for how much it was allowed to shrink. When Stephen Silver bought it, the stone was an oval pink diamond graded Fancy Intense, one step below the top grade for pink color. Trade reports at the time of the sale give its weight as 16.21 carats; CNN, GIA and Silver's own firm put it at 16.10 carats.

Silver saw a problem in the way it had been cut. He told CNN the stone had been cut about 15 years earlier, and a trade report said he had noticed that the cut left parts of it looking washed out. In an interview after the sale he called it the most elegant pink diamond he had ever seen, but said the symmetry and color were off on one side.

His plan was to recut it, losing weight on purpose, in the hope that the color would climb one grade to Fancy Vivid. 'The leap between intense pink and vivid pink is huge,' he told CNN. The risk was that the stone could come out smaller and no better.

When the work was finished the diamond weighed 14.93 carats, and the Gemological Institute of America graded it Fancy Vivid pink with VVS1 clarity. Silver renamed it the Pink Promise.

The jeweler who recuts colored diamonds

Stephen H. Silver is a Graduate Gemologist of the GIA who founded his own jewelry firm in Menlo Park, California, in 1980, according to his firm's history. The business grew alongside Silicon Valley wealth, and in 2009 it opened a retail store of about 100 square feet in a Menlo Park hotel, in a space the firm says was first meant to be the hotel's coat closet.

The Pink Promise was not his first gamble on a recut. His firm credits him with turning a Fancy Intense blue into the 6.04-carat Fancy Vivid San Francisco Blue in 2000, and with recutting a Fancy Vivid purple-pink Argyle diamond into a 1.46-carat Fancy purplish-red in 2002. In 2010 he donated the Cullinan Blue Diamond Necklace to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Silver has been careful to share the credit. He said the cutter he chose, whom he did not name, was someone with whom he had a long history and many successful recuts of blue and green diamonds. 'The cutter is everything in the process,' he said.

Back on the wheel

Accounts of the timeline differ. A trade report at the time of the sale said Silver bought the stone in June 2013; CNN said he oversaw the recut over three years; Silver himself called the sale 'the end of a three-year project.' His firm's published history says he acquired the stone in 2016 and oversaw multiple recutting sessions over 18 months.

The work was slow. Silver said the diamond is Type IIa, a chemically very pure type, which made it harder to cut, and that the oval is the most complicated shape to rework. He told CNN that his team could now measure facets to thousandths of a millimeter rather than tenths, and he said they modeled angles, light return and color before cutting.

Midway through, the project stalled, and Silver said GIA stepped in to help. The hardest decision came late: to reach the color he wanted, he had to let the stone fall below 15 carats. He said the color reached the intensity he hoped for 'in the last 15%.'

He set the finished stone in a platinum ring with a halo of colorless diamonds. He said he sized it at 6 1/2, half a size smaller than his wife's ring.

One night in Hong Kong

The Pink Promise was the top lot of a jewelry sale in Hong Kong on November 28, 2017, billed beforehand as the most expensive jewel that sale series had ever offered. The presale estimate was $28 million to $42 million. A second pink in the same sale, an 8.80-carat Fancy Intense, carried an estimate of $8.8 million to $12 million.

The mood going in was uncertain. Less than two weeks earlier, the 37.30-carat Raj Pink, described as the largest known Fancy Intense pink diamond, had failed to find a buyer at auction in Geneva.

The Pink Promise sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for about $32.16 million (HK$250 million). An interview with Silver gives the exact figure as $32,163,932. The price landed in the lower part of the estimate. The 8.80-carat pink sold for $9.7 million, a jadeite bead necklace brought $12.3 million, and the whole sale totaled $93.7 million.

Silver said afterward that he had expected 'a little more momentum,' but called the result pretty good. The auction house's chairman for Europe and Asia called it 'a very, very strong price.'

Record, or nearly

Whether the Pink Promise set a record depends on which report you read. GIA's 2017 roundup put the price at $2.13 million per carat. One trade magazine reported $2.15 million per carat and called it a new per-carat record for a pink diamond, and Silver's firm describes it as a world record price per carat.

CNN and the AFP wire report, citing the auction house, said it was the second-highest price per carat ever paid for a pink diamond, just short of the roughly $2.15 million per carat paid for a pink of about five carats in Hong Kong in 2009. The sources do not settle it, and neither will this page.

What is not in dispute is the scale of the result. GIA's roundup set it beside the far larger 59.60-carat Pink Star, which sold that April for $71.2 million, or about $1.2 million per carat. The Pink Promise brought close to twice that per carat after giving up more than a carat of its weight.

Silver's firm now describes the stone as one of the ten largest Fancy Vivid pink diamonds in history. The buyer has never been named, and no later public sale of the stone was found in the sources for this page.

The numbers

Carat weight

14.93 carats (recut from a stone reported at 16.21 or 16.10 carats)

Color and clarity

Fancy Vivid pink, VVS1 (GIA); Fancy Intense pink before the recut

Diamond type

Type IIa

Shape

Oval

Origin mine

Not disclosed in published reports

Cutter

Recut overseen by Stephen Silver; the cutter has not been named

Timeline

1. 1980

   Stephen H. Silver founds his jewelry firm in Menlo Park, California.

2. 2000

   Silver's firm recuts a Fancy Intense blue diamond into the 6.04-carat Fancy Vivid San Francisco Blue, its first major colored-diamond upgrade.

3. 2002

   Another Silver recut turns a Fancy Vivid purple-pink Argyle diamond into a 1.46-carat Fancy purplish-red.

4. 2009

   A pink diamond of about five carats sells in Hong Kong for about $2.15 million per carat, the mark the Pink Promise would later be measured against.

5. Jun 2013

   Silver buys the stone, then a Fancy Intense pink, according to a trade report at the time of the sale. His firm's history dates the purchase to 2016.

6. Apr 4, 2017

   The 59.60-carat Pink Star sells in Hong Kong for $71.2 million, a record for any gemstone at auction.

7. Nov 15, 2017

   The 37.30-carat Raj Pink fails to sell at auction in Geneva.

8. Nov 21, 2017

   The Pink Promise is announced as the top lot of a Hong Kong jewelry sale, estimated at $28 million to $42 million.

9. Nov 28, 2017

   The Pink Promise sells in Hong Kong for about $32.16 million to an anonymous telephone bidder.

10. Jan 19, 2018

    GIA's annual auction roundup lists the Pink Promise at $2.13 million per carat and notes that it was recut from a Fancy Intense stone.

The world in 2017

• Aug 17, 2017

  Astronomers observe a collision of two neutron stars in both gravitational and electromagnetic waves for the first time.

• Nov 2, 2017

  A new species of orangutan is identified in Indonesia, the first great ape described in almost a century.

• Nov 15, 2017

  Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sells at auction in New York for $450 million, a record for any work of art.

• Nov 15, 2017

  Zimbabwe's military places President Robert Mugabe under house arrest. He resigns six days later after 37 years in power.

• Nov 20, 2017

  Nature publishes research identifying 'Oumuamua as the first known object from outside the Solar System.

• Nov 22, 2017

  Ratko Mladić is found guilty of genocide at Srebrenica in The Hague and sentenced to life in prison.

• Dec 14, 2017

  The Walt Disney Company announces it will acquire most of 21st Century Fox for $66 billion.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, The Pink Promise is number 14 of 100 in the jewelry entries of the FLOAT 100. 44 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (13 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Silver gave up more than a carat of the stone's weight in pursuit of a single step up in color grade.
• He said the hardest decision of the project was letting the stone drop below 15 carats.
• The ring was made to a 6 1/2 finger size, which Silver said was half a size smaller than his wife's.
• Silver said the color reached the intensity he wanted only in the last 15% of the cutting.
• He said his team could measure facets to thousandths of a millimeter, where cutters once worked in tenths.
• The same Hong Kong sale also offered 27 early jewels by the artist Wallace Chan.