home Hair How much does the largest processed emerald crystal weigh? About the largest emeralds in the world. The most expensive emerald

How much does the largest processed emerald crystal weigh? About the largest emeralds in the world. The most expensive emerald

From the famous Indian Diamond in the British Crown to a sapphire the size of soccer ball- learn about the most perfect gemstones in the world:

1. Koh-i-Noor Diamond, gem british crown

The Kohinoor is a 106-carat diamond that was once the largest diamond in the world. It was previously owned by various rulers in India. Today it is in the possession of the British royal family and is part of the Crown Jewels.

When the Kohinoor Diamond came into the hands of the British royal family, it weighed 186 carats (37 grams). Prince Albert carefully sought out a diamond cutter of very good reputation and went to the Netherlands, where he entrusted the diamond cutting mission to a certain Mr. Cantor, who undertook the difficult task. The diamond was then presented to Queen Victoria.

It became one of the jewels in the Queen's crown and was last worn by Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (Queen Mother) at her coronation to celebrate her becoming Empress of India.

2. Millennium Sapphire, an engraved sapphire the size of a football

The Millennium Sapphire, about the size of a football, is a gemstone carved with famous historical figures. The sapphire is for sale if someone decides to spend $180 million on it and promises that this 61,500-carat wonder will be placed in a place open to the public.

Designed by Italian artist Alessio Boschi, the Millennium Sapphire was conceived as a tribute to human genius and features 134 figures, including those of Beethoven, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Millennium Sapphire is owned by a consortium of investors led by Daniel McKinney. In the past 15 years, the impressively chiseled sapphire has been on public display only twice - at the 2002 Academy Awards, and two years later on the maiden voyage of the Sapphire Princess cruise ship.

The 28cm Millennium Sapphire was found in Madagascar in 1995. In its raw state it weighed about 90,000 carats, but lost about a third of its weight during the processing process, which took two years and was completed in 2000.

3. Aquamarine Don Pedro, the largest aquamarine in the world

The world's largest aquamarine, cut from a single piece, is on permanent display in Washington next to the Hope Diamond and Marie Antoinette's earrings.

Extracted from Brazilian pegmatite in the 1980s, and named after Brazil's first two emperors, the Don Pedro Aquamarine holds a special place in the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution.

The green-blue obelisk-shaped gemstone was cut by the famous German cutter, Bernd Munsteiner, known as the “father of the fancy cut.” The height of the stone is 35.5 centimeters and it weighs 10,363 carats, or two kilograms.

4. The largest pearl in the world

The largest luminous pearl in the world was shown on November 21, 2010, in the city of Wenchang, Hainan Province, South China. Weighing six tons and measuring 1.6 meters in diameter, the pearl is the largest ever discovered and is valued at $301,197,000. In China, pearls are valued more highly than diamonds.

The stone, formed primarily from the mineral fluorite, glows green In the dark. Those who found this miracle had to spend three years honing it into the shape of a pearl.

5. Pink Graff(Graff Pink), the most expensive pink diamond in the world

Lawrence Graff is the world's premier diamond and gemstone dealer, and in 2010 he lived up to his reputation with the purchase of a stunning, rare 24.78-carat pink diamond.

He is also the UK's richest living art buyer, easily shelling out $24.1 million in New York for Warhol's two best works, Elvis and Campbell's Soup Can. Laurence Graff also owns five luxury homes in England, France, Switzerland and New York, as well as a personal Mediterranean yacht, and owns his own diamond mine outside Johannesburg, along with half a dozen properties in Mayfair. (Mayfair).

A stunning "potentially flawless" pink diamond set a new auction price record, surprising workers at Sotheby's. The auction was filled with gasps as bids continued to rise. Pink diamonds have never caused such excitement in the UK. Ultimately 36 Britain's richest man, a diamond-obsessed eccentric, paid $45 million, the largest sum ever paid for jewelry.

6. Ethereal Carolina Divine, the world's largest processed Paraiba tourmaline

Montreal financier Vincent Boucher is the owner of the Divine Ethereal Carolina Paraiba, an approximately 192-carat Paraiba tourmaline that is estimated to be worth between $25 million and $125 million. Divine Ethereal Carolina has set a new world record for the largest processed Paraiba tourmaline.

Paraiba Tourmaline is one of the rarest gemstones in the world, highly prized by connoisseur collectors and jewelers, and displayed by elite jewelers around the world. For every 10,000 diamonds, there is only one Paraiba tourmaline (named for the Brazilian region where most tourmalines, including Boucher's, were mined) and Boucher noted that only 50 kilograms of it in total have been found to date. precious stone.

7. Huge 478-carat rough diamond

A huge 478-carat diamond was found in the Letseng Mine in Lesotho, a small kingdom in South Africa. It is the 20th largest diamond ever found, and was found in a mine that has already produced three of the world's largest diamonds: the 603-carat Lesotho Promise, the 493-carat Leteng Legacy and 601 carat Lesotho Brown. A similar but smaller stone was recently valued at $12 million. It is believed that this stone will produce a 150-carat cut gemstone, which will reduce the significance of the current largest Kohinoor diamond.

8. The world's most expensive gemstone, valued per carat, sold at auction

Defined as one of the world's unique gemstones, the flawless blue diamond was awarded the title of the world's most expensive gemstone in 2007. The 6.04-carat stone sold for $7.98 million at Sotheby's in Hong Kong. The flawless blue diamond was sold for $1.32 million per carat.

The lucky buyer was London-based Moussaieff Jewelers, who were happy to purchase this diamond from a private Asian collector as it would add to their collection of rare gems. Blue diamonds are known for attracting filthy rich moneybags with their brilliant, dark charisma. Although this is not the most big Stone, its skillful cut and “vivid blue” color justify the hefty price per 1 carat, which is almost ten times the price per 1 carat of a regular white diamond.

9. Bahia Emerald, the largest in the world

The Bahia emerald is one of the largest emeralds in the world and contains the largest crystal ever found. The stone, weighing approximately 381 kilograms (1,900,000 carats), was found in the Brazilian state of Bahia. It narrowly escaped flooding during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 while being stored in a warehouse in New Orleans. It was subsequently reported stolen from a secure storage facility in South El Monte, Los Angeles, California, in September 2008. While the stone was valued at approximately $400 million, its true value remains unclear. At one point, the emerald was even listed on eBay for $75 million.

After it was transported from Brazil to the United States, numerous unsuccessful attempts were made to sell it, but the sale was prevented by conflicting ownership rights. The emerald was eventually recovered from a Las Vegas gem dealer and taken into the custody of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

10. Moussaieff Red Diamond, the most famous red diamond

Once known as the Red Shield Diamond, the Musaev Red Diamond is the largest red diamond in the world, measuring 5.11 carats. Discovered in Brazil in the 1990s, the diamond is a triangular brilliant cut (also known as a trillion cut) and was most recently put on public display at the 2003 Splendor of Diamonds exhibition at the Smithsonian. museum.

The largest emerald in the world

At the end of May, a giant emerald weighing 272 kilograms was found in Brazil. How much could such a stone cost? Sixteen years earlier, a 340-kilogram Bahia emerald found nearby was valued at nearly a billion dollars. Fourteen people and one state fought for the right to own the giant gem, but no one got it.

Carnaiba

In early 2001, garimpeiro miners emerged from a tiny mine on a farm in the state of Bahia and then pulled out from the ground not just a precious stone, but a whole block weighing more than 340 kilograms. Such large gems had never been seen in those places.

Brazilian emeralds are not of high quality. They usually cost ten dollars per carat, that is, hundreds or even thousands of times cheaper than stones mined in Colombia and Zambia. Selling large emeralds, oddly enough, is especially difficult. No one can say with certainty how much they cost. Ultimately, the price depends only on the amount of money the buyer has and the persuasiveness of the seller, so the emerald trade attracts swindlers and scammers of all sorts like a magnet.

Someone offered the garimpeiro five thousand dollars, and they readily agreed: better is a bird in the hand than a pie in the sky. The stone was immediately resold for 20 thousand, then it changed hands several more times and eventually went to two businessmen from the city of Sao Paulo: former bookseller Elson Ribeira and his partner Rui Saraiva. They hid the emerald in the garage and waited for a buyer.

Emerald Bahia

Silicon Valley

37-year-old American Anthony Thomas was not in poverty. He had a small but successful construction business. During the dot-com boom, he invested more than $200,000 in a trendy California startup called Digital Reflection, which was developing a new generation of liquid crystal displays. TV kept showing investors from Silicon Valley who made billions from similar deals. The businessman hoped that he too would get a piece of this pie.

He did not yet know that 2001 was a bad time for such hopes. In a few months, the investment bubble will deflate, and hundreds of startups will go bankrupt. When Digital Reflection founder Wayne Catlett approached him in July and hinted that the company urgently needed more investment, Thomas decided the situation could still be salvaged.

He recalled a conversation with Ken Conetto, a consultant with whom he collaborated on his construction sites. Conetto loved to talk about Brazilian emerald mines. Thomas and Catlett contacted him and a plan was born. They decided to use Conetto’s connections to buy emeralds at a bargain price, which were actually worth at least $25 million. You can take out a large loan using stones as collateral and invest it in a highly profitable fund. This will help keep the startup afloat.

In September, the Americans flew to Sao Paulo. Conetto took Thomas to his Brazilian acquaintances - Ribeira and Saraiva. They showed him a 340-kilogram emerald. “60 thousand dollars - and it’s yours,” said one of the Brazilians.

The American businessman couldn't believe his luck. He claims that after returning to America, he immediately transferred 60 thousand dollars to the Brazilians and began to wait. The emerald was supposed to be sent by mail, but the package never arrived. A few months later, Thomas asked Conetto to fly to Sao Paulo and find out the reason for the delay. Brazil reported that the stone was sent, but was lost on the way to California.

New Orleans

From Konetto's point of view, events developed differently. During the trial that began several years later, he insisted that in reality there was neither the money that Thomas talks about, nor an agreement to send him by mail. According to him, the gem remained in Brazil legally and was kept in a secure bank for three years.

In 2004, Conetto, the Brazilians and Catlett, who joined them after Digital Reflection went bankrupt, registered Gemworks Mining in Panama. After this, the Bahia emerald nevertheless went to the United States. The package, with a stated value of $100, arrived in San Jose without incident.

The partners tried to use the stone in all sorts of schemes of dubious legality. He wandered between a warehouse in San Jose, the office of lawyer Catlett and the vault of a former federal bank in New Orleans, where Katrina, the most destructive hurricane in the history of the United States, found him. The disaster broke the dams that protected the city, the bank building was flooded, and the giant emerald was submerged under water for several weeks.

11 kg Theodore emerald.

The 858-carat Gachalá is considered one of the most famous emeralds in the world.

A 2,860-carat Colombian emerald bowl kept in the Habsburg treasury in Vienna

Soon Conetto met Larry Bigler. He claimed to be in the real estate business and gave the impression of being a wealthy and respectable man. The Bahia emerald immediately captivated him, but not with its beauty (the stone is strikingly ugly), but with the opening prospects. Bigler had no doubt that he would find a rich idiot who loved minerals more than dollars.

He convinced Conetto that he could push the emerald, and promised him half the proceeds if he gave him the stone. Biegler then found a gem dealer in New York and offered him 10 percent if he sold the gem for more than $25 million.

The dealer set up a page on the online auction site eBay and put the emerald up for sale with a starting price of $19 million. The lot was accompanied by a flowery story about Brazilian miners who spent several months dragging the precious stone through the jungle, fighting off attacks by panthers. Despite this, the auction attracted only one bid. Bigler ordered it to be canceled and began to look for other options.

El Monte

In November 2007, Bigler invited a bankrupt businessman named Jerry Ferrara to take on this business. At one time he sold real estate, but then he lost everything and was forced to sleep in his car. “It was simply incredible,” Ferrara later recalled. -Bigler came with daddy and gave me ownership of the largest emerald in the world. He said he was looking for someone like me."

Bigler assigned him to meet with Keith Morrison, an unpleasant Mormon from Idaho who wants to buy diamonds for $1.3 million. Ferrara negotiated a deal and promised to give him the Bahia emerald if anything happened to the promised stones.

As a result, Morrison really did not receive the diamonds and the giant emerald became his property. He teamed up with Ferrara and Bigler to look for a buyer together. Potential buyers were taken to the vault in the Californian city of El Monte, where the stone was kept.

Partners claim that Arab sheikhs and even former chairman of the board of directors of the NASDAQ stock exchange Bernie Madoff were eyeing the Bahia emerald. He, if they are to be believed, promised them 21 million in cash, $91 million in diamonds and three wristwatch worth 15 million dollars. Two days before the deal, he was arrested and accused of creating a financial pyramid. Now he is in prison - serving a sentence of 150 years.

In June 2008, Bigler disappeared. Soon news came from him: he wrote that he had been kidnapped by the Brazilian mafia and begged him to pay a ransom. Ferrara immediately suspected something was wrong. He began to look into it and found out that Bigler was not at all a wealthy developer from California, as he claimed, but an ordinary plumber, and not a particularly good one: on the Internet they complained that he took money and did nothing.

An angry Ferrara was absolutely sure that the Brazilian mafia was also a fiction. A scam to trick him out of money. He told Morrison about it and they drove to El Monte. They managed to convince the manager to open the vault. The men pulled out the emerald, loaded it into a car and drove it to Las Vegas.

A few hours later, Bigler showed up in El Monte. He didn't find the stone, so he called the police and reported the robbery.

Emerald weighing 272 kilograms, found in Bahia on May 22, 2017

Las Vegas

The search for the emerald was assigned to detectives Scott Miller and Mark Gaiman from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. “It was a funny thing,” Miller recalls. - At first."

They spent several weeks tracking Bigler's missing partners and eventually found Morrison. He agreed to hand over the emerald to law enforcement on the condition that both he and Ferrara remain free. The detectives were not against it, but they were afraid of deception.

With a dozen police officers armed with machine guns, Miller and Gaiman drove to Las Vegas in several cars. When they arrived, local special forces were already waiting for them at the appointed place. A helicopter circled over the meeting place. Mormon didn't lie. Morrison came in a tracksuit and handed over the giant emerald without resistance. As promised, he and Ferrara were left untouched, and the gem was taken back to California and deposited in a police vault as evidence.

Figuring out who actually owns the Bahia emerald turned out to be difficult. The longer detectives tried to solve this case, the more they hated it. "It's a puzzle from hell," Miller says. There are almost two dozen characters in this story, and each has his own agenda. As a result, the decision on the ownership issue was left to the court.

The litigation continued for almost ten years. Everyone sued everyone - even that New York dealer who wrote tales on eBay about panthers and the jungle. While the proceedings were ongoing, Bigler disappeared again.

At one time, the scales tipped in favor of Anthony Thomas, who paid $60,000 for the emerald, but he could not find the receipt. According to him, all evidence of payment burned down along with the house in 2006. As a result, Thomas' claims were rejected.

In 2013, Thomas appealed. During the retrial of the case, which lasted for several years, Ferrara and Morrison managed to convince the judge that they were right. On June 23, 2015, the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that the Bahia emerald should become the property of the company they founded, FM Holdings.

However, the story did not end there. Brazil has claimed its rights to the precious stone. The country's authorities believe that the Bahia emerald was exported illegally and should be returned to its homeland. The US Department of Justice blocked the transfer of the gem to FM Holdings, but negotiations on the return of the stone dragged on.

Thomas declared bankruptcy to avoid paying ruinous legal bills, Ferrara works part-time as a private detective, and Conetto shares a cluttered trailer with his 99-year-old mother and dreams of a large yacht and a castle in Dubrovnik. The 340-pound emerald that brought them together continues to gather dust in a police storage facility in Los Angeles.

The emerald weighing 11.5 kilograms was put up for auction and valued at $1.15 million.

The green mineral, the size of a small watermelon, containing 57,700 carats, was auctioned on January 28, 2012 at Western Star Auctions, a weekly auction in British Columbia.

The stone, named Teodora, was mined in Brazil and cut in India. Its owner was gem buyer Reagan Reaney, who emphasizes that it is not a pure emerald.

“It's an emerald, but the exact amount of emerald it contains is impossible to determine,” says gemologist Jeff Nechka, who examined the jewel.

Nechka said he could not say with complete certainty that the specimen was the largest emerald in the world.

“There is color variation in the stone, and therefore at least a quarter of its volume may be white beryl, the parent mineral of emerald,” he says. - The surface of the stone is very well colored, but I doubt that the green color extends to the entire depth. According to my estimates, in this case it is advisable to talk not about the whole stone as a jewel, but about its emerald layer, 3-5 cm thick.”

Emerald is transparent beryl colored green by chromium oxide or vanadium oxide.

Director of the Gemological Institute of America's West Coast Identification Service Shane McClure is skeptical that this block is called an emerald.

“This is not an emerald, but beryl with an admixture of emerald! says McClure. - In order to completely paint such a stone green, it would take at least several tens of millions of years! I am convinced that the main constituent element of this so-called jewel is beryl, the surface of which is slightly tinted green. I believe that its original cost is greatly inflated and, according to my estimates, should be no more than 5 thousand dollars.”

Despite the fact that the stone has a rich color, it is so large that it is simply impossible to measure its transparency, and therefore the standard assessment of the quality of emeralds is not applicable to it.

Experts have not been able to determine the depth to which the green color extends in the stone, so at the moment it is not possible to determine whether price corresponds to quality.

Reagan Rainey is convinced that his giant 'cobblestone' is worth the money claimed, even though it is not a jewelry stone:

“We do not cheat or deceive, but we say honestly that this is an emerald, which, apparently, contains beryl. This is a precious stone, but not of jewelry quality, which is why we sell it at such an affordable price! The highlight of this emerald is not the quality, but the size, and I have no doubt that it will find its owner,” Rainey said an hour before the auction began.

The stone was never sold and was sent for research to the Gemological Institute of America, where the exact amount of emerald it contained would be determined.

A huge emerald weighing 11.5 kg (57,700 carats) was sold at auction in British Columbia. The price of the transaction, which took place on January 28, 2012, was $1.15 million. The buyer of the gem was Reagan Rainey, a buyer of precious metals.

The giant stone, the size of a watermelon, has its own name - Teodora. It was mined in a mine in Brazil. The jewel was sent to Indian jewelers for polishing.
Gemstone experts, gemologists, do not consider Theodora to be a pure emerald. This nugget has significant flaws.

« There is heterogeneity in color in the stone,” commented expert Jeff Nechka, “ at least a quarter of the total mass is white beryl. It is advisable to talk not about a whole nugget, but about a 3–5 cm layer of precious mineral».

With rating unusual stone Difficulties also arose. Theodora is so large that it is difficult to appreciate its transparency. Most likely, not the entire nugget is green, but only its upper layers. However, the surface of the emerald has a rich green color. An accurate assessment has not yet been carried out and it is unknown whether this stone is natural or whether it was grown artificially. Artificial gems, like quartz, are used to decorate expensive kitchen surfaces; just go to quartz to see this.

There are emeralds that are already officially recognized as record holders. For example, the largest mined precious crystal of this stone weighed 28 kg before processing. It was found in a mine in Brazil.

Among cut emeralds, the largest gem weighing 7.5 kg is considered to be the largest. It was also mined in Brazilian mines. In 1973, it was sold at a gem fair in Brazil. Its owner was the Lebanese oligarch Salim el Awar.