88-Carat Black Diamond on Display

The Black Orloff is the most famous black diamond in the world. The 195-carat uncut stone originally featured as one of the eyes in a statue of Brahma, the Hindu God of creation, which stood in a shrine in the southern Indian city of Pondicherry. Brahma is the "the Creator" of the three main gods in Hinduism, so this diamond is also known as "the eye of the Creator". It is said that in order to break the curse of Brahman, it was cut into three pieces and then moved around the world. Going back to the turn of the 18th century, the diamond was in the possession of a Russian heir named Princess Nadia Vygin-Orlov. This unverified legend still lives on and it's the mystique of The Black Orloff that makes great contribution to its fame in the jewelry industry.

The Spirit of Grisogono weighs a hefty 312.24 carats, making it one of the largest diamonds in the world and the second largest black diamond ever found. The 587-carat rough diamond is part of a famous black diamond collection by the illustrious Swiss jeweler Fawaz Gruosi, the owner of the luxury jeweler company, de Grisogono. Found in the mines of Central Africa, The Spirit of de

Grisogono found its way to Switzerland where Gruosi carefully cut the diamond to the shape it is today using a historical Moghul cutting technique. It took more than a year to work out its cutting technique, design and to really cut the rough gem. Today, this stone sits on a ring with over 700 studded diamonds. At last, the ring was sold to private customers of de Grisogono.

The Gruosi Diamond, weighing 115.34 carats, is the biggest heart-shaped black diamond in the world. The Gruosi Diamond features an unequal amount of hard and soft areas. Certain spots were very fragile, while others were extremely hard, which brings more difficulty in cutting. As such, it took 3 years to cut the rough diamond emerged as the 115.34-carat Gruosi Diamond, resulting in an enormous loss of about 184.78 carats. Today, the heart shaped black stone is the centerpiece of a necklace set in white gold with 58.77 carats of smaller black diamonds, 378 white diamonds, and 14.1 carats of tsavorite garnets.

 Amsterdam Black Diamond, discovered in South Africa, is a 33.74-carat, pear-shaped black diamond, with its original weight of about 56 carats. The stone fetched a $352,000 price tag in Christies’ 2001 London Auction. It was exhibited in the European Diamond Council to the public and was named Amsterdam by its owner D.Drukker to honor the 700th anniversary of the City of Amsterdam.

Although these black natural diamonds are well-known and sought after by people, this kind of black, the embodiment of the mystery, is known by few throughout jewelry history. It seems that only in the Victorian period, Queen Victoria only wore jewelry mainly in black to show her grief of losing her spouse. Therefore, black became the main choice of jewelry at that time, which made the natural black diamond popular for some time. But most of the time, the natural black diamonds cost highly due to its scarcity, resulting in their few presence in the market or international auction. People who wear them are often labeled as "outliers". It was not until the late 1990s that this concept was gradually reversed. Designers began to try to use natural black diamonds in jewelry. However, most of the time, natural black diamond was used to contrast with white diamond or serve as ornament, and was rarely used as main stone inlay.