For more than 70 years, a 24-carat pink diamond set by Bulgari stayed with one European noble family and never came to auction. On November 10, the Bulgari Pink diamond closed Christie's week of sales in Geneva and sold for CHF 12,086,000. Stones of its colour and size have reached the saleroom only a handful of times. Just how rare is a pink diamond like this?
How Rare Is the CHF 12 Million Bulgari Pink Diamond?
For more than 70 years, a 24-carat pink diamond set by Bulgari stayed with one European noble family and never came to auction. On November 10, the Bulgari Pink diamond closed Christie's week of sales in Geneva and sold for CHF 12,086,000. Stones of its colour and size have reached the saleroom only a handful of times. Just how rare is a pink diamond like this?
November 10, 2026
On the evening of November 10, the last lot of Christie's Magnificent Jewels sale at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues in Geneva was a ring that had never been offered at auction. The Bulgari Pink diamond, a 24.00-carat emerald-cut stone graded Fancy Intense Pink, sold for CHF 12,086,000, about US$14.8 million, near the middle of its CHF 10–15 million estimate. Before the sale, Max Fawcett, Christie's global head of jewellery, had called it "the Mona Lisa of pink diamonds", according to the Associated Press. Its weight alone places it in very small company.
The company is small enough to count on one hand. In 2023, when Phillips offered a 20.19-carat Fancy Intense Pink in Geneva, the auction house described it as the fourth largest diamond of that grade ever to appear at auction. Larger ones on record include the Graff Pink, 24.78 carats, sold at Sotheby's Geneva in 2010; the Princie, 34.65 carats, sold by Christie's New York in 2013; and the 37.30-carat Raj Pink, offered at Sotheby's Geneva in 2017. At 24 carats, the Bulgari Pink falls between the Graff Pink and the Phillips stone, which by that reckoning makes it one of the five largest of its grade ever offered.
Part of the reason is supply. Western Australia's Argyle mine produced about 90% of the world's pink diamonds before Rio Tinto closed it in 2020, after 37 years. The largest rough pink ever found in Australia, the Argyle Pink Jubilee announced in 2012, weighed 12.76 carats, roughly half the finished weight of the Bulgari Pink. According to family lore cited by Christie's, the Bulgari Pink began as a rough stone that the consignor's family bought in India in the 1950s and later entrusted to Bulgari in Rome. It had stayed in private hands for more than 70 years.
Rarity here has two layers. The first is physical: a colour, a grade and a weight that the world's main source of pink diamonds never matched. The second is that the stone had never been offered at auction; Christie's stressed that it was fresh to the market and unseen for more than seven decades. Size alone is no guarantee of a sale, and the Raj Pink went unsold in 2017. The Bulgari Pink, for its part, sold with a provenance that rests partly on family lore. In high jewellery, a first appearance is the one thing no collector can be offered twice.
How rare, then, is a pink diamond like this? Rare enough that the Bulgari Pink diamond joins a list of Fancy Intense pinks above 20 carats that, by Phillips's reckoning, fits on one hand, at a weight the world's leading pink mine never matched. And rare in a second sense: until November 10, no buyer had ever had the chance to bid on it.
