The Moussaieff Red

The William Goldberg Diamond Corporation, famous for outstanding stones like the Premier Rose and the Guinea Star, cut this gem from a 13.90-carat rough. They transformed the piece into a spectacular red diamond weighing 5.11 carats. The GIA states, "It is the largest Fancy Red, natural color diamond that we have graded as of the date the report was issued." The stone is a triangular brilliant, sometimes refered to as a trillion or a trilliant cut. It was cut sometime in the mid-1990s, so its history is still relatively uneventful. Sometime around 2001 or 2002 the stone was purchased by Moussaieff Jewellers Ltd. The firm, while it has no website as of yet, is renowned for multi-million dollar pieces of jewelry and has locations in the United States as well as abroad.

The Moussaieff Red paid a visit to the Smithsonian Museum in 2003, being part of an exhibit titled The Splendour of Diamonds (above photo). The exhibit lasted from June 27th to September 30th and featured a number of other unusual colored diamonds, namely the Millennium Star, the Heart of Eternity, the Pumpkin Diamond, the Allnatt Diamond, the Ocean Dream, and the Steinmetz Pink.

Michael Hing, a gemologist in Great Britain, was shown the stone in person in London sometime around 2002. "It’s a really suprising cranberry colour, quite unlike any other diamond I’ve ever seen," he writes. "The actual color of the stone is much more like the top photo [on this page] than the bottom photo."

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