De Beers Millennium Jewel 4, one of the dozen rare diamonds De Beers assembled to mark the year 2000, sold for $31.8 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong.

An anonymous buyer snapped up the 10.10-carat oval-shaped fancy vivid blue diamond, paying about $3.2 million per carat and falling into the range expected for the stone's sale. 

The De Beers Millennium Jewels: Exceptional Collection of 11 Important Blue Diamonds

Once a while, when a special diamond makes an appearance, it is a rare discovery; however, when a unique collection of special diamonds is unveiled, it is truly a once in a millennium experience. To celebrate the Millennium in 2000, De Beers, together with The Steinmetz Group, showcased an exceptional collection of rare and valuable diamonds, De Beers Millennium Jewels, in a specially designed exhibit at London's Millennium Dome. The exhibition that lasted throughout the year consisted of the 203.04 carat Millennium Star and eleven phenomenal blue diamonds of various shapes and weights totaling 118 carats, ranging in size from a 5.16 carat pear-shaped to a 27.64 carat heart-shaped diamond, The Heart of Eternity, each specially inscribed with a De Beers Millennium number using De Beers' proprietary branding technique.

This magnificent collection even instigated the "robbery of the millennium" when a ten-ton JCB digger broke through the wall of the Dome only to find replaced replicas of the diamonds which were replaced a day earlier in preparation of the heist. The robbers, armed with sledgehammers, guns and grenades smashed through the gem's armored casing before being detained.

As the most important collection of blue diamonds to be presented at one time, it took De Beers decades to put the collection together. Nine out of the eleven diamonds have been graded by the GIA as Fancy Vivid Blue color and two of Fancy Intense Blue color. Blue diamonds owe their color to impurities of boron, and many are modified with a grey secondary tone, or an uneven saturation with areas of colorless windowing. Very few stones have the intensity or an even saturation as these Millennium blue diamonds and it is this combination of color, saturation and brilliance that make them truly miracles of nature. Historically, blue diamonds were recovered mainly in India and Brazil, but for the last 100 years, they have been randomly and sporadically found in the Premier Mine (since renamed the Cullinan Mine) in South Africa, the source of these fine blue diamonds. Blue diamonds make up much less than 0.1 percent of all diamonds recovered at this mine, and to discover one annually of quality and size is an extremely unusual occurrence.

Since its initial appearance at the Millennium Exhibition in 2000, only one of these diamonds have ever come into the open market, when Sotheby's Hong Kong sold the "De Beers Millennium Jewel 11", a 5.16 carat internally flawless pear-shaped fancy vivid blue diamond in April 2010.

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