The little piece that chiped-off of Lesedi La Rona...
Discovered in 2015, that diamond is about the size of a tennis ball and weighs nearly a half pound. Only the 3,106-carat Cullinan, unearthed in South Africa in 1905, was larger. It is estimated to be 3 billion years old and it was created when Earth was still being formed.
Continuing its mission to source exceptional stones, the diamond jeweler Graff has revealed the acquisition of a 373.72-carat rough diamond sourced from Botswana’s Karowe mine, for a sum of $17.54 million making it to US$46,935 per carat, just under the US$47,790 per carat they paid for the Lesedi La Rona.
Interestingly, the 373.7-carat shard was the smaller of two shards broken off the Lesedi la Rona. The other was “The Constellation,” an 813-carat marvel that sold for $63 million in 2016, setting a world record for a rough gem. All three stone are rated Type IIa, the purest of all diamonds because they are composed solely of carbon with virtually no trace elements in the crystal lattice. Each of the three was found within two days of each other in mid-November 2015.
Had the Lesedi la Rona remained intact during the mining and sorting process, the rough gem would have tipped the scales at more than 2,295 carats.