Trivia: 15 Facts
Amazing facts about diamonds:
- With more than 500 years of being the center for diamonds and the diamond trade, Antwerp is up until today a major hub of the industry: About 80% of all rough diamonds (per volume) and more than 50% of all polished diamonds are traded in Antwerp´s four (!) diamond exchanges.
- Today about 90% of all diamonds in volume are cut in India. In terms of value 60% of all diamonds are cut in India. Usually loupe-clean diamonds above two carats are cut and polished in Antwerp, Israel or New York.
- An estimated 5 million people have access to appropriate healthcare globally thanks to revenues from diamonds.
- Conflict diamonds have been reduced from about 3% to considerably less than 1% since the implementation of the Kimberley Process in 2003.
- The most expensive diamond ever sold was the Pink Star which yielded an incredible $ 82 Million at a Sotheby´s auction in 2013.
- The largest polished diamond is the Golden Jubilee with 545.6 carats and is part of the Thai crown jewels. The precious stone is estimated to be worth around $ 12 Million.
- The second-largest polished diamond was part of Cullinan I and is now known as the “Greater Star of Africa” weighing 530,2 carats and belongs to the English crown jewels.
- The largest ever found diamond is not on earth, but about 50 lightyears away from earth: In 2004 astronomers found a white dwarf star as a chunk of crystallized carbon of 4,000 km in diameter and named it “Lucy” according to the Beatles song “Lucy in the sky with diamonds”.
- World production of diamonds in 2014 was about 125 Million carats; more than half of which came from Africa, one third originates in Russia and the rest from Canada and Australia. We are talking about only 25 tons.
- One carat equals 0.2 grams, i.e. a five carats diamond weighs exactly one gram. If color, clarity and cut are equal the price of a diamond increases exponentially with carat weight. A one carat diamond costs more than four quarter carat stones.
- Blue and red are the rarest colored diamonds. Less than 0.1% of all natural diamonds show blue color.
- America buys more than 40 percent of the world’s gem quality diamonds.
- When talking about color in diamonds one actually refers to a diamonds lack of color. The color scale for white diamonds reaches from D to M.
- Diamonds are billions of years old—in some cases more than three billion years old.
- Graphite (as contained in a pencil) and diamond both are 100% carbon. However, due to the immense heat and pressure within the earth´s crust diamonds turn into their unique form and become hardest mineral on earth.