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Famous Diamonds in the World The Blue Heart Diamond
The Blue Heart Diamond
Origin of name
The name "Blue Heart" looks to have been moved by the rare deep blue color of the diamond and it's extremely stunning heart-shaped cut, that makes it possibly the world's prettiest blue diamond. The "Blue Heart" diamond is occasionally known as the "Unzue" diamond, subsequent to the Argentinean woman Mrs. Unzue who has the diamond for 43 years, having obtained it from Cartier's in 1910, and two years after its invention. The diamond is also incorrectly referred to as the "Eugenie Blue," following Empress Eugenie of France, the empress wife of Napoleon III (1852-1870), but she could never have owned this diamond since it was discovered only in 1908. The Blue Heart Diamond is a rare type Blue Diamond.
Characteristics of the stone
The Blue Heart diamond is a heart-shaped, 30.62-carat, blue diamond. The color ranking of the diamond is not identified, but the color is variously referred to as deep blue, dark blue, steel blue etc. However, if one goes by the outer shells of the diamond, it may be eligible as a fancy intense blue or fancy vivid blue, according to the GIA color grading system.
The Blue heart diamond is an exceptional Type IIb diamond and all naturally colored blue diamonds fit in to this group. Conversely, the incidence of these diamonds is much less than 0.1 % of all ordinary diamonds. Type II diamonds are nitrogen-free or contain invisible quantities of nitrogen.
If the diamonds are not barely nitrogen-free but free of all new chemical contaminations, they are known as Type IIa, which comprises about 1-2 % of all naturally occurring diamonds. Though, as an alternative of nitrogen, if they surround sketch quantities of impurity boron, the diamonds are referred as Type IIb. Boron atoms included in the gemstone structure of the diamond, alters it's combination spectrum pass on the blue color to the diamonds. Moreover, the diamonds become semi-conducting, different from other diamonds which are non-conductors of electrical energy.
History of the diamond
The Blue Heart diamond surely did not fit in toEmpress Eugenie of France, but certainly there is a French association to this diamond, as the rough diamond was cut and refined, and distorted into its current heart-shaped form by the famous French diamond cutting rigid, Atanik Ekyanan of Neuilly, Paris stuck between 1909 and 1910. Formerly the source of the diamond was doubtful, and attention to be either India or South Africa, yet though by the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of the historical diamond mines of the Eastern Deccan Plateau in India were previously discarded.
Though, this anonymity has been answered and more information about the diamond has been discovered, thanks to the constant efforts of the devoted scientists of the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, the current owners of the diamond. The investigates went into the records of De Beers, and unearthed proof to illustrate that the diamond was revealed in the Premier diamond pits of South Africa, in November, 1908, and the rough stone weighed upto 102 carats. The rough stone was finally cut and polished in Paris as stated prior and sold to Cartier's, who place the diamond in a "Lily of the Valley" spray and sold it to an Argentinean woman Mrs. Unzue. The diamond stayed with the Unzue family until 1953, when it was obtained by the jewelry firm Van Cleef & Arpels, who dismantled the corsage surroundings, and re-set the diamond in a pendant, bordered by 25 colorless or white diamonds. The pendant and the associated necklace were valued at $ 300,000, and were sold to an anonymous European titled family. In 1959, Harry Winston attained the diamond, and re-set it over again in a platinum ring and advertised it to Marjorie Merriweather Post. The diamond stayed with Mrs. Post until the 1960s, when she finally determined to donate the rare blue diamond to the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, at Washington DC, where it is on show in the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals, in the National Museum of Natural History.
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