$50 mln rare diamond snapped up by Lebanese origin business woman

An exceptionally rare 19-carat pink diamond that fetched $50 million at Christie’s auction house was purchased by a jewelry house owned by a Swiss business woman of Lebanese origins.

The Pink Legacy was purchased by US-based luxury jeweler Harry Winston, owned by Swatch, whose CEO is Nayla Hayek, daughter of Lebanese immigrant and late Swatch founder Nicolas Hayek.

“The saturation, the intensity of this stone is as good as it gets in a colored diamond,” Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s international head of jewelry, said on Christies.com.

The 18.96-carat diamond was discovered in a South African mine around a century ago, Christie’s said. It was probably cut in the 1920s and has not been altered since.

“$2.6 million per carat. That is a world record per carat for a pink diamond,” said Francois Curiel, head of Christie’s in Europe, and a jewel expert.

“This stone for me is the Leonardo Da Vinci of diamonds, I don’t think there is anything better.”

Harry Winston promptly renamed it “The Winston Pink Legacy,” adding it to its collection of rare jewels, the auction house said.

The Pink Legacy is not the first rare diamond Hayek has strived to possess after taking over Swatch following the death of her father in 1995. She had previously bought “The Winston Blue” in 2014 for $ 23.8 million.

Hayek is known as a horse breeding expert and for her love of Arabian horses, as she owns more than 60 Arabian horses, and specializes in the breeding Egyptian horses.