In honor of Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee marking her 70 years on the British throne, the BBC will air a documentary that includes previously unseen footage of the monarch as a young princess beaming with delight as she admires her new engagement ring. Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen features a clip of Prince Philip's first […]
The Royal Canadian Mint is about to auction "The Ultimate," a one-of-a-kind, 1 kilogram platinum coin embellished with 462 ultra-rare pink diamonds from the world-famous Argyle diamond mine. Although it has a face value of CAD$2,500, the coin is expected to fetch as much as CAD$900,000 ($697,300) at the Heffel Fine Art Auction House in Toronto […]
Welcome to Music Friday when we bring you new tunes with jewelry, gemstones or precious metals in the title or lyrics. Today, the Seratones — fronted by gospel-trained powerhouse A.J. Haynes — remind you to "keep a diamond in your mind" in their 2022 release, "Good Day." The song tells us that if we keep […]
Adam Hardin, an avid amateur diamond hunter and frequent visitor to Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, recently landed a 2.38-carat brown sparkler — the largest found at the park this year. About the size of a pinto bean, with a coffee brown color and irregular rounded shape, the diamond was discovered on April […]
Sourced at the celebrated Cullinan mine in South Africa, the internally flawless, 103.49-carat, emerald-cut gem known as "The Light of Africa Diamond" will headline the New York Magnificent Jewels sale on June 8, as part of Christie’s Luxury Week. The D-color diamond, which was cut from a 299.3-carat rough stone unearthed in January of 2021, […]
Here's the story about how an impoverished New Jersey youngster became a prima donna at the New York Metropolitan Opera, married a telecommunications executive and was gifted what was to become one of the most famous emeralds of all time. Today, the 167-carat "Mackay Emerald" is the largest cut emerald in the Smithsonian National Gem […]
Japanese researchers have created an ultra-pure, two-inch-wide diamond wafer that has the storage capacity of 25 billion gigabytes. That's equivalent to the information on one billion Blu-ray Discs or the amount of data distributed by all the world's mobile devices in a single day. Developed by Adamant Namiki Precision Jewel Co. and Saga University, the […]
Welcome to Music Friday when we bring you classic tunes with jewelry, gemstones or precious metals in the title or lyrics. Today, Hank Williams Jr. tells the story of his 700-mile Southwestern odyssey in a 1975 song called “Clovis, New Mexico.” Williams recounts how he and his bronc-riding pal, Billy, head out on a very-low-budget […]
The 15.10-carat "De Beers Blue" came within a whisker of setting a new world record for the priciest vivid blue diamond ever sold at auction. The hammer price of $57,471,960 at Sotheby's Hong Kong last night was just short of the $57,541,779 achieved by the 14.62-carat "Oppenheimer Blue" at Christie's Geneva in 2016. The single-lot, […]
Mother's Day 2022 jewelry sales are expected to hit $7 billion, making it the fastest-growing and highest-volume gift-giving category for the second year in a row, according to an annual survey released by the National Retail Federation (NRF). The jewelry sector's record-breaking tally is up from $6.1 billion in 2021 and $5.3 billion in 2020. […]