Even in the best of times, it’s the worst of times, as far as supply goes, for natural-color (a.k.a. “fancy”) blue diamonds. Nevertheless, no one remembers times quite this bad for finding fancy-color diamonds with this much-coveted hue. And, no one expects things to get better any time soon.
Oh sure, one can find stones with somewhat fanciful, rather than fancy, color that the Gemological Institute of America, this country’s chief pedigree of diamonds, compassionately classifies as “faint blue” or “very light blue.” But just try to find true-blue stones that deserve any of GIA’s really meaty grades: “fancy light blue,” “fancy blue” or, on the rarest of occasions, “fancy dark blue.” Here the pickings are the slimmest in decades. And dealer asking prices, often $50,000 or more per carat for top-rated 1-carat “fancy blue” stones, reflect this nagging scarcity.
“It’s been at least six months since we’ve had any blues in stocks,” says Chuck Meyer of Henry Meyer Co., a New York diamond-cutting firm that specializes in fancy colors and shapes. “If we had known that availability would become this much of a problem, we would have paid premiums on blues just to have them to show our customers.” Why is finding fancy-color blue diamonds proving so tough?
The Blue as Barometer
Earlier in this decade, it was considered a truism that, except for one-in-a-million greens and reds, fancy pinks were the rarest of all natural-color diamonds. Then when Australia’s gigantic Argyle diamond deposits came on stream in the mid 1980s, miners unexpectedly found robust purplish pinks in something as close to abundance for this color as the gem world will probably ever know. As a result, blue has moved ahead of pink in the rarity rankings.
By contrast, production from mines famous for blues, such as South Africa’s Premier Mine, had been tucked in a bit to counter 1970s glut and 1980s recession in the fine diamonds market. Further, as part of De Beers’ iron-willed market stabilization program, begun in 1982 and still in effect, many of the most valuable roughs coming to the company from its own mines or mines affiliated with it, have been withheld from distribution.
Withholding fancy colors would be in De Beers’ interests at this time. For the past few years, the media has paid especially close attention to gem and jewelry auction results. Prices paid for fancy-color diamonds—pinks and blues especially—are being taken as an indicator of the fine diamond market’s overall health. This is why some dealers believe that De Beers is doing all it can to see that fancy colors perform well at auction, primarily reining in hard on supplies of the rough that yields them. “Ir doesn’t take much to increase the scarcity of something that’s already pretty scarce,” notes Alan Bronstein, Aurora Gems, New York. “The Syndicate (short for De Beers in the trade) probably figures it’s better that people make a big fuss over the price if a 1-carat blue than a 1-carat D-flawless diamond.”
Of course, there is the possibility that De Beers, as omnipotent as it sometimes seems in diamond affairs, may have nothing to do with the present acute shortage in the American market of fancy blue diamonds. Instead, the steep slide of the U.S dollar since September 1985 could have detoured many of the blues that once ordinarily came to the country to more prosperous points of fancy-color diamond popularity such as Japan and the Middle East.
“Despite Black Monday 1987,” explains a Prudential- Bache broker who follow hard assets and collectibles, “there is still no end of 1980s new wealth waiting to convert a little of itself from it’s home currencies, however proud, to crème-de-la-crème tangibles such as Van Gogh paintings or high-provenance gems” The reasons? “Prestige and protection,” the broker answers. “New money, like old money, seeks the sanctity of rare, prized possessions like fine-colored diamonds”
A Different Glory
The best blue diamonds have a beauty that is really not comparable to that of any other gem. Yet dealers constantly describe them in terms like “sky blue” or “satin blue” that imply a role model of other breeds. “If you’re looking for something that has the rich midnight blue of a Sri Lankan sapphire, you’ll be disappointed,” says fine gem specialist Ralph Esmerian, R. Esmerian Inc., New York. “But if you’re looking for a combination of moderate blue and unique brilliance, then the diamond has no peer.”
Today such looking may take on the nature of a quest. Stones with exceptional hues are proportionately far rarer among diamonds than among sapphires. Usually, Bronstein says, “the blue of a diamond is strongly modified by gray or black. Few stones have intense, saturate color.”
This is a fact of life few jewelers are prepared for: they first stock blue diamonds. One possible reason: the 450-carat dark blue Hope diamond that dealer Harry Winston bought in 1947, donated to the Smithsonian Institute 10 years later and which has since become the most famous gem in the world. This stone’s highly unusual inky blue may have encouraged unrealistic jeweler expectations.
So when they finally encounter the norm of stones with strong intensity modifiers, they experience something of a let-down. “The trick is to learn to accept the blue diamond on its own terms,” Bronstein says.
Learning to accept blue diamonds on their own terms requires a bit of an adjustment. But the extreme rarity of such stones really leaves no choice. Whats more, minor color failings are generally compensated for by fire and brilliance, the diamond’s two most celebrated virtues other than hardness. So it helps to incorporate the total criteria of diamond beauty into one’s appreciation and evaluation of any fancy blue diamond. Admittedly, this takes some training.
However, since training requires experience, and the stones necessary for such experience are scarce, many dealers and jewelers rely heavily on GIA grading reports. This can be dangerous. At best, GIA fancy diamond reports are loose guides to color quantity-not quality. Because report grades represent very arbitrary cut-off points on a rather broad color intensity scale, even stones given the same grade can be vastly dissimilar in intensity and hue.
Therefore, nothing can replace the jeweler’s own eye for a final verdict on the beauty of a blue diamond, especially with current prices around $ 15,000 per carat for eye-clean, light-tint 1-carat sizes, Dealer Bronstein urges jewelers to put light-tint stones to one simple test. “Make sure they face up blue,”‘ he says. “If they don’t, they should be considered closer (in value) to white than fancy-color diamonds.’
Please note: this profile was originally published in 1988 in Modern Jeweler’s ‘Gem Profiles: The First 60’, written by David Federman with photographs by Tino Hammid.
The 4.35-carat natural blue diamond shown in the header image is courtesy of R. Esmerian Inc., New York.
